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THE BEAST 



BY 
JUDGE BEN B. LINDSEY 

OF THE JUVENILE COURT 
OF DENVER 

AND 
HARVEY J. O'HIGGINS 

AUTHOR OF 
"THE SMOKE-EATERS," "DONA-DREAMS," Etc, 




NEW YORK 
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 

1910 



^ 



ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OP TRANSLATION 
INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN 

COPYRIGHT, I909, I9IO, BY THE RIDGWAY COMPANY 

COPYRIGHT, I9IO, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 

PUBLISHED, APRIL, I9IO 



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To those who have helped : the hundreds whose 
names I have not had room to mention; the thousands 
whose names I do not even know. 

B. B. L. 



; And they fling him, hour by hour, 
Limbs of men to give him power; 
Brains of men to give him cunning ; and 

for dainties to devour 
Children's souls, the little worth; hearts 

of women, cheaply bought : 
He takes them and he breaks them, but 
he gives them scanty thought" 

The Brute 
by William Vaughn Moody. 



— 



NOTE 

In the winter of 1908, the editor of Everybody's 
Magazine obtained from Judge Lindsey the manu- 
script of a series of articles of an autobiographical 
nature. The articles had been dictated hurriedly 
to a stenographer in Judge Lindsey's intervals 
of leisure, and they were not in a form in which 
they could be published. The editor sent Harvey 
J. O'Higgins to Denver to work with Judge 
Lindsey on them; this book is the result. It is a 
joint work, but the autobiographic "I" of Judge 
Lindsey's first draft has been preserved, because 
the voice is still Judge Lindsey's, though the pen 
that reports it is another's. 



vu 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 



Introduction xi 

The Beast 3 

I. Finding the Cat 7 

II. The Cat Purrs . 26 

III. The Cat Keeps on Purring ... 44 

IV. The Beast in the Democracy . . 55 
V. The Beast in the County Court . . 74 

VI. The Beast and the Children ... 95 

VII. The Beast, Graft and Business . 113 

VIII. At Work with the Children ... 133 

IX. The Beast and the Ballot ... 153 

X. The Beast and the Ballot {Con- 
tinued) 170 

XI. The Beast at Bay 185 

XII. The Beast and the Supreme Court 203 

XIII. The Beast and Reform .... 220 

XIV. A City Pillaged 237 

XV. The Beast, the Church and the 

Governorship 257 

XVI. Hunting the Beast 281 

XVII. A Victory at Last 299 

XVIII. Conclusion 323 

ix 



INTRODUCTION 

Judge Lindsey is known to the world at large 
for his work in the Juvenile Court of Denver; 
and, to his little courtroom there, come Children 
Society agents from all parts of the states, visi- 
tors from England, officers from Germany, and 
government officials sent from Sweden, Austria, 
France and Japan to study his laws and learn 
his methods. But to himself, to Denver, to his 
friends, and — most of all — to his enemies, his 
famous Juvenile Court is only an incident, a 
side issue, a small detail in the man's amazing 
career. For years he has been engaged in a 
fight of which the founding of his Juvenile Court 
was only the merest skirmish. 

It is a fight that has carried him into politics 
to find both political parties against him. It 
has been carried on without the consistent support 
of any newspaper, and with now one, now the 
other, and at times all the party organs in Den- 
ver cartooning and attacking him. The thieves, 
the gamblers, the saloon keepers and the pros- 
titutes have been cheered on against him. There 
have been times when even the churches have 
been afraid to aid him. The men of wealth — the 
heads of the street railway, the telephone company, 



xii INTRODUCTION 

the gas and electric company, the water com- 
pany, and most of the other Denver corporations 
and combinations of finance — have made it 
their particular ambition and personal aim to 
beat him down and crush him out of public life. 
He has fought alone — at times absolutely alone. 
And he is still fighting! 

He has been offered bribes that might buy a 
millionaire. He has been promised a career in 
politics, a fortune in law. He has been given the 
hope of worldly preferments that might seduce 
the highest ambition. When these have failed 
to win him, he has been threatened with all the 
punishments that the most unscrupulous power 
and the bitterest hate could conceive. To de- 
stroy his reputation, false affidavits have been 
sworn out by fallen women, accusing him of the 
lowest forms of vice. Attempts have been made 
to lure him to houses of ill-repute where men were 
lying in wait to expose him. The vilest stories 
about him have been circulated in venomous 
whispers from man to man and woman to woman. 
Friends have been frightened or bought or driven 
from him. His life has been threatened. Special 
laws have been introduced at the State Capitol 
against him. The Denver Chamber of Commerce 
has publicly branded him an enemy of the state. 
At times the very lights in his rooms at the Court 
House have been cut off — as the last and smallest 
annoyance of spite — and he has had to go to 



INTRODUCTION xiii 

the corner drugstore at night and buy himself 
candles to continue his work! 

And why? For what has he been fighting? 
What terrible thing has he sought to attain ? 
Read his story. Here it is, as told by himself, 
without malice, in a sort of good-humoured 
indignation, with a smile that is sometimes bitter 
in spite of a patience that seems beyond words. 
It is a story that would be appalling if it were 
not for the fact that through it all he himself 
moves in the very figure of hope. It is a story that 
is true not only of Denver but of any other Ameri- 
can city in which a Lindsey might appear. It 
is a story of the fight of one man against the 
conditions that threaten to make the American 
democracy a failure in government and a farce 
in the eyes of the world. 

And it is a story of achievement. Without 
money, without powerful friends, without the 
dominating qualities of a personal popularity, 
this one man, in an obscure struggle, has written, 
upon the statute books of Colorado, laws that 
have been copied round the world. He has codi- 
fied probate laws, purged election laws, and 
instituted a reform in criminal jurisprudence that 
is as revolutionary in our day as the teachings of 
Christ were in the "eye-for-an-eye" days of the 
Jews. The list of reforms he has obtained, 
charities founded, public improvements insti- 
tuted and political steals balked, shows nearly a 



xiv INTRODUCTION 

hundred items. He has obtained nothing for him- 
self but the praise and support of some citizens 
of Denver, and the curse and enmity of others. 
The Reverend Henry Augustus Buchtel, Chancel- 
lor of the Denver University, and ex-Governor 
of the State of Colorado, in the year 1904, coupled 
his name with Christ's — no less! — and in the 
year 1907 called him, through the newspapers, "a 
nincompoop" and a "fice dog"! Those are the 
two crowns that have been offered him: a halo 
and a fool's cap. Which shall it be? To which 
is he entitled in the eyes of the democracy whose 
battle he is helping to fight ? 

Here follows the evidence. The choice shall be 
your own. 

H. J. O'H. 



THE BEAST 



THE BEAST 

AMONG the picture puzzles of your child- 
l hood, there was one that showed a forest 
of entangled branches, tree trunks, fallen timber 
and dense underbrush; and the problem was, in 
that bewildering jumble of lines, to "find the cat." 
You traced the outline of a tail among the 
branches; you spied a paw in the crook of a tree 
limb ; you picked out the barrel of the animal's body 
in the bark of a trunk; an ear pricked up from 
the underbrush; an eye stared from the bole of 
a fallen tree. And when, turning the picture on 
its side, you gathered those clues together in 
your eye, suddenly you saw — not the house- 
cat you had expected, but the great "cat" of the 
jungle, crouching there, with such a threatening 
show of teeth that it almost frightened you into 
dropping the card. Do you remember that ? 

Well, there is hidden in our complicated Amer- 
ican civilization just such a beast of the jungle. 
It is not a picture in a picture puzzle. It is a 
fact in a fact puzzle. There is no man among 
us, in any sort of public business or profession, 
who has not seen its tail or its paw concealed 
among the upper branches, or its eyes and ears 
watching and listening in the lowest underbrush 



4 THE BEAST 

and fallen timber of our life. It is there — wait- 
ing. To some it has appeared to be a house cat 
merely ; and it has purred to them very soothingly, 
no doubt. But some have come upon its claws, 
and they have been rather more than scratched. 
And others have found its teeth, and they have 
been bitten — bitten to the soul. A few, who 
have watched it and stalked it carefully, know 
that it is, at the last, very like the dragon in the 
old fable of Greece, to whom some of the people 
were daily sacrificed. For it lives upon us. Yes, 
it lives upon us — upon the best of us as well as 
the worst — and the daughters of the poor are 
fed to it no less than the sons of the rich. If you 
save your life from it, it is at the price of your 
liberty, of your humanity, of your faith with your 
fellows, whom you must hand over to it, helpless. 

And if you attack it ! 

I propose to tell, in this story of my own experi- 
ence, what happens if you attack it. I propose to 
show the Beast from its tail to its nose-tip, and 
to show it as it is when it has ceased to purr 
and bares its teeth. I propose to mark its trail and 
name its victims, to warn you of where it lurks 
and how it springs. I do not hope to set you on 
in any organized assault upon it — for I have 
learned that this is too much to hope — but I 
trust that I shall be able to show you where the 
fight against it is being fought, so that you may 
at least recognize your own defenders and not 



THE BEAST 5 

be led to cry out against them and desert them — 
when the Beast turns polecat — and even, at 
the instigation of treachery, to come behind your 
champion and stab him in the back! 

The Beast in the jungle! How it fights! Any 
man who truthfully writes the story of his cam- 
paigns against it will not write from any motives of 
vainglory ; there is anything but glory to be gained 
in that war. And I do not write in any "holier 
than thou" attitude of mind, for I understand 
how I blundered into the hostility, and how the 
accidents of life and the simplicities of misunder- 
standing have brought me again and again into 
collision with the brute. But I write because 
men have said to me, "You are always crying 
'Wolf! Wolf!' when w T e see no wolf. Show us. 
We're from Missouri. Don't preach. Tell us 
the facts." And I am going to tell the facts. 
They will be "personal." They must be per- 
sonal. I shall have to w r rite about myself, about 
my friends, about those who consider me their 
enemy. There is no other way. It is a condition 
of this whole struggle with the Beast that the man 
who fights it must come out into the open w^ith 
his life, conspicuously and with the appearance 
of a strut — like some sort of blessed little hero- 
martyr — while it keeps modestly under cover 
and watches him and bides its time! 



CHAPTER I 

FINDING THE CAT 

I CAME to Denver in the spring of 1880, at 
the age of eleven, as mildly inoffensive a 
small boy as ever left a farm — undersized and 
weakly, so that at the age of seventeen I com- 
monly passed as twelve, and so unaccustomed 
to the sight of buildings that I thought the five- 
story Windsor Hotel a miracle of height and 
magnificence. I had been living with my maternal 
grandfather and aunt on a farm in Jackson, Ten- 
nessee, where I had been born; and I had come 
with my younger brother to join my parents, who 
had finally decided that Denver was to be their 
permanent home. The conductors on the trains 
had taken care of us, because my father was a 
railroad man, at the head of the telegraph system; 
and we had been entertained on the way by the 
stories of an old forty-niner, with a gray mous- 
tache, who told us how he had shot buffalo on 
those prairies where we now saw only antelope. I 
was not precocious ; his stories interested me more 
than anything else on the journey; and I stared 
so hard at the old pioneer that I should recognize 
him now, I believe, if I saw him on the street. 

7 



8 THE BEAST 

My schooling was not peculiar; there was noth- 
ing "holier than thou" in my bringing up. My 
father, being a Roman Catholic convert from the 
Episcopalian Church, sent me to Notre Dame, 
Indiana, to be educated; and there, to be sure, I 
read the "Lives of the Saints," aspired to be a 
saint, and put pebbles in my small shoes to "mor- 
tify the flesh," because I was told that a good 
priest, Father Hudson — whom I all but wor- 
shipped — used to do so. But even at Notre 
Dame, and much more in Denver, I was home- 
sick for the farm; and at last I was allowed to 
return to Jackson to be cared for by my Protestant 
relatives. They sent me to a Baptist school till 
I was seventeen. And when I was recalled to 
Denver, because of the failure of my father's 
health, I went to work to help earn for the house- 
hold, with no strong attachment for any church 
and with no recognized membership in any. 

I suppose there is no one who does not look 
back upon his past and wonder what he should have 
become in life if this or that crucial event had 
not occurred to set his destiny. It seems to me 
that if it had not been for the sudden death of my 
father I, too, might have found our jungle beast 
a domestic tabby, and have fed it its prey without 
realizing what I was about. I should have been 
a lawyer, I know; for I had had that ambition 
from my earliest boyhood, and I had been con- 
firmed in it by my success in debating at school. 



FINDING THE CAT 9 

(Once, at Notre Dame, I spoke for a full hour 
in successful defence of the proposition that 
Colorado was the "greatest state in the Union," 
and proved at least that I had a lawyer's "wind.") 
But I should probably have been a lawyer who has 
learned his pleasant theories of life in the colleges. 
And on the night that my father died, the crush- 
ing realities of poverty put out an awful and 
compelling hand on me, and my struggle with 
them began. 

I was eighteen years old, the eldest of four chil- 
dren. I had been "writing proofs" in the Denver 
land office, for claimants who had filed on Gov- 
ernment land; and I had saved $150 of my salary 
before my work there ceased. I found, after my 
father's death, that this $150 was all we had in 
the world, and $130 of it went for funeral expenses. 
His life had been insured for $15,000, and we 
believed that the premiums had all been paid, 
but we could not find the last receipt; the agent 
denied having received the payment; the policy 
had lapsed on the day before my father's death; 
and we got nothing. Our furniture had been 
mortgaged; we were allowed only enough of it to 
furnish a little house on Santa Fe Avenue; and 
later we moved to a cottage on lower West Col- 
fax Avenue, in w^hich Negroes have since lived. 

I went to work at a salary of $10 a month, in 
a real estate office — as office boy — and car- 
ried a "route" of newspapers in the morning before 



- 



10 THE BEAST 

the office opened, and did janitor work at night 
when it closed. After a month of that, I got a 
better place, as office boy, with a mining com- 
pany, at a salary of $25 a month. And finally, 
my younger brother found work in a law office 
and I "swapped jobs" with him — because I 
wished to study law! 

It was the office of Mr. R. D. Thompson, who 
still practises in Denver; and his example as an 
incorruptibly honest lawyer has been one of the 
best and strongest influences of my life. 

I had that one ambition — to be a lawyer. 
Associated with it I seem to have had an unusual 
curiosity about politics. And where I got either 
the ambition or the curiosity, I have no idea. 
My father's mother was a Greenleaf,* and related 
to the author of "Greenleaf on Evidence," but 
my father himself had nothing of the legal mind. 
As a boy, living in Mississippi, he had joined the 
Confederate army when he was preparing for 
the University of Virginia, had attained the rank 
of captain, had become General Forrest's private 
secretary, and had written — or largely helped to 
write — General Forrest's autobiography. He 
was idealistic, enthusiastic, of an inventive gen- 
ius, with a really remarkable command of English, 
and an absorbing love of books. My mother's 
father was a Barr, from the north of Ireland, 
a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian; her mother was a 

*A New England family, to which the poet Whittier was related. 



FINDING THE CAT 11 

Woodfalk of Jackson County, Tennessee, a Meth- 
odist. The members of the family were practical, 
strong-willed, able men and women, but with no 
bent, that I know of, toward either law or 
politics. 

And yet, one of the most vivid memories of my 
childhood in Jackson is of attending a political 
rally with my grandfather and hearing a Civil 
War veteran declaim against Republicans who 
"waved the bloody shirt 5 ' — a memory so strong 
that for years afterward I never saw a Repub- 
lican without expecting to see the gory shirt on 
his back, and wondering vaguely why he w T as not 
in jail. When I came to Denver, where the 
Republicans were dominant, I felt myself in the 
land of the enemy. And when I "swapped" 
myself into Mr. Thompson's office, I was sur- 
prised to find that my employer, though a Repub- 
lican from Pittsburg, was so human that one 
of the first things he did was to give me, a suit of 
clothes. If there is anything more ridiculously 
dangerous than to blind a child's mind with such 
prejudices, I do not know what it is. 

However, my own observations of w^hat was 
going on about me were already opening my eyes. 
I had read, in the newspapers, of how the Denver 
Republicans won the elections by fraud — by 
ballot-box stuffing and what not — and I had 
followed one "Soapy" Smith on the streets, 
from precinct to precinct, with his gang of 







12 THE BEAST 

election thieves, and had seen them vote not once 
but five times openly. I had seen a young man, 
whom I knew, knocked down and arrested for 
"raising a disturbance" when he objected to 
"Soapy" Smith's proceeding; and the policeman 
who arrested him did it with a smile and a wink. 
When I came to Mr. Thompson to ask him how 
he, a Republican, could countenance such things, 
he assured me that much of what I had been 
reading and hearing of election frauds was a 
lie — the mere "whine" of the defeated party — 
and I saw that he believed what he said. I 
knew that he was an honest, upright man; and I 
was puzzled. What puzzled me still more was this : 
although the ministers in the churches and "prom- 
inent citizens" in all walks of life denounced 
the "election crooks" with the most laudable 
fervour, the election returns showed that the best 
people in the churches joined the worst people 
in the dives to vote the same ticket, and vote it 
"straight." And I was most of all puzzled to 
find that when the elections were over, the oppo- 
sition newspaper ceased its scolding, the voice 
of ministerial denunciation died away, and the 
crimes of the election thieves were condoned 
and forgotten. 

I was puzzled. I saw the jungle of vice and 
party prejudice, but I did not yet see "the Cat." 
I saw its ears and its eyes there in the under- 
brush, but I did not know what they were. I 



FINDING THE CAT 13 

thought they were connected with the Republi- 
can party. 

And then I came upon some more of the brute's 
anatomy. Members of the Legislature in Denver 
were accused of fraud in the purchase of state 
supplies, and — some months later — members 
of the city government were accused of commit- 
ting similar frauds with the aid of civic officials 
and prominent business men. It was proved in 
court, for example, that bills for $3 had been 
raised to $300, that $200 had been paid for a 
bundle of hay worth $2, and $50 for a yard of 
cheesecloth worth five cents; barrels of ink had 
been bought for each legislator, though a pint 
would have sufficed; and an official of the Police 
Department was found guilty of conniving with a 
gambler named "Jim" Marshall to rob an express 
train. I watched the cases in court. I applauded 
at the meetings of leading citizens who denounced 
the grafters and passed resolutions in support 
of the candidates of the opposition party. I 
waited to see the criminals punished. And they 
were not punished. Their crimes were not denied. 
They were publicly denounced by the courts and 
by the investigating committees, but somehow, 
for reasons not clear, they all went scot-free, on 
appeals. Some mysterious power protected them, 
and I, in the boyish ardour of my ignorance, 
concluded that they were protected by the Repub- 
lican "bloody shirt" — and I rushed into that 



14 THE BEAST 

(to me) great confederation of righteousness and 
all-decent government,, the Democratic party. 

It would be laughable to me now, if it were 
not so "sort of sad." 

Meanwhile, I was busy about the office, copy- 
ing letters, running errands, carrying books to 
and from the court rooms, reading law in the 
intervals, and at night scrubbing the floors. I 
was pale, thin, big-headed, with the body of an 
underfed child, and an ambition that kept me 
up half the night with Von Hoist's "Constitu- 
tional Law," Walker's "American Law," or a 
sheepskin volume of Lawson's "Leading Cases 
in Equity." I was so mad to save every penny 
I could earn that instead of buying myself food 
for luncheon, I ate molasses and gingerbread 
that all but turned my stomach; and I was so 
eager to learn my law that I did not take my 
sleep when I could get it. The result was that I 
was stupid at my tasks, moody, melancholy, and 
so sensitive that my employer's natural dissat- 
isfaction with my work put me into agonies of 
shame and despair of myself. I became, as the 
boys say, "dopy." I remember that one night, 
after I had scrubbed the floors of our offices, I 
took off the old trousers in which I had been 
working, hung them in a closet, and started 
home; and it was not until the cold wind struck 
my bare knees that I realized I was on the street 
in my shirt. Often, when I was given a brief 



FINDING THE CAT 15 

to work up for Mr. Thompson, I would slave over 
it until the small hours of the morning and then, 
to his disgust — and my unspeakable mortifica- 
tion — find that my work was valueless, that I 
had not seized the fundamental points of the 
case, or that I had built all my arguments on 
some misapprehension of the law. 

Worse than that, I was unhappy at home. 
Poverty was fraying us all out. If it was not 
exactly brutalizing us, it was warping us, break- 
ing our healths and ruining our dispositions. 
My good mother — married out of a beautiful 
Southern home where she had lived a life that 
(as I remembered it) was all horseback rides 
and Negro servants — had started out bravely 
in this debasing existence in a shanty, but it was 
wearing her out. She was passing through a 
critical period of her life, and she had no care, no 
comforts. I have often since been ashamed of 
myself that I did not sympathize with her and 
understand her, but I was too young to under- 
stand, and too miserable myself to sympathize. 
It seemed to me that my life was not w r orth liv- 
ing — that every one had lost faith in me — that 
I should never succeed in the law or anything else 
— that I had no brains — that I should never 
do anything but scrub floors and run messages. 
And after a day that had been more than usually 
discouraging in the office and an evening of 
exasperated misery at home, I got a revolver and 



16 THE BEAST 

some cartridges, locked myself in my room, con- 
fronted myself desperately in the mirror, put the 
muzzle of the loaded pistol to my temple, and 
pulled the trigger. 

The hammer snapped sharply on the cart- 
ridge; a great wave of horror and revulsion swept 
over me in a rush of blood to my head, and I 
dropped the revolver on the floor and threw myself 
on my bed. 

By some miracle the cartridge had not exploded ; 
but the nervous shock of that instant when I felt 
the trigger yield and the muzzle rap against my 
forehead with the impact of the hammer — that 
shock was almost as great as a very bullet in the 
brain. I realized my folly, my weakness; and I 
went back to my life with something of a man's 
determination to crush the circumstances that 
had almost crushed me. 

Why do I tell that? Because there are so 
many people in the world who believe that pov- 
erty is not sensitive, that the ill-fed, overworked 
boy of the slums is as callous as he seems dull. 
Because so many people believe that the weak and 
desperate boy can never be anything but a weak 
and vicious man. Because I came out of that 
morbid period of adolescence with a sympathy 
for children that helped to make possible one of 
the first courts established in America for the 
protection as well as the correction of children. 
Because I was never afterward as afraid of 



FINDING THE CAT 17 

anything as of my own weakness, my own coward- 
ice — so that when the agents of the Beast in 
the courts and in politics threatened me with 
all the abominations of their rage if I did not 
commit moral suicide for them, my fear of yield- 
ing to them was so great that I attacked them 
more desperately than ever. 

It was about this time, too, that I first saw the 
teeth and the claws of our metaphorical man- 
eater. That was during the conflict between 
Governor Waite and the Fire and Police Board 
of Denver. He had the appointment and removal 
of the members of this Board, under the law, and 
when they refused to close the public gambling 
houses and otherwise enforce the laws against 
vice in Denver, he read them out of office. They 
refused to go, and defied him, with the police at 
their backs. He threatened to call out the militia 
and drive them from the City Hall. The whole 
town was in an uproar. 

One night, in the previous summer, I had fol- 
lowed the excited crowds to Coliseum Hall to 
hear the Governor speak, and I had seen him 
rise like some old Hebrew prophet, with his long 
white beard and patriarchal head of hair, and 
denounce iniquity and political injustice and 
the oppressions of the predatory rich. He appealed 
to the Bible in a calm prediction that, if the reign 
of lawlessness did not cease, in time to come "blood 
would flow in the land even unto the horses' 



18 THE BEAST 

bridles."' (And he earned for himself, thereby, 
the nickname of i% Bloody Bridles" TVaite.) 

Now it began to appear that his prediction 
was about to come true: for he called out the 
militia, and the Board armed the police. My 
brother was a militiaman, and I kept pace with 
him as his regiment marched from the Armouries 
to attack the City Hall. There were riflemen 
on the towers and in the windows of that build- 
ing; and on the roofs of the houses for blocks 
around were sharpshooters and armed gamblers 
and the defiant agents of the powers who were 
behind the Police Board in their fight. Gat liner 
guns were rushed through the streets; cannon 
were trained on the City Hall: the long lines of 
militia were drawn up before the building; and 
amid the excited tumult of the mob and the 
eleventh-hour conferences of the Committee of 
Public Safety, and the hurry of mounted officers 
and the marching of troops, we all waited with 
our hearts in our mouths for the report of the first 
shot. Suddenly, in the silence that expected 
the storm, we heard the sound of bugles from 
the direction of the railroad station, and at the 
head of another army — a body of Federal soldiers 
ordered from Fort Logan by President Cleveland, 
at the frantic call of the Committee of Public 
Safety — a mounted officer rode between the 
lines of militia and police, and in the name of 
the President commanded peace. 



FINDING THE CAT 19 

The militia withdrew. The crowds dispersed. 
The police and their partisans put up their guns, 
and the Beast, still defiant, went back sullenly to 
cover. Not until the Supreme Court had decided 
that Governor Waite had the right and the power 
to unseat the Board — not till then was the City 
Hall surrendered; and even so, at the next election 
(the Beast turning polecat), "Bloody Bridles " 
Waite was defeated after a campaign of lies, 
ridicule, and abuse, and the men whom he had 
opposed were returned to office. 

I had eyes, but I did not see. I thought the 
whole quarrel was a personal matter between the 
Police Board and Governor Waite, who seemed 
determined merely to show them that he was mas- 
ter ; and if my young brother had been shot down 
by a policeman that night, I suppose I should 
have joined in the curses upon poor old "Bloody 
Bridles." 

However, my prospects in the office had begun 
to improve. I had had my salary raised, and I 
had ceased doing janitor work. I had become 
more of a clerk and less of an office boy. A num- 
ber of us "kids" had got up a moot court, rented 
a room to meet in, and finally obtained the use of 
another room in the old Denver University build- 
ing, where, in the gaslight, we used to hold "quiz 
classes" and defend imaginary cases. (That, by 
the way, was the beginning of the Denver Univer- 
sity Law School.) I read my Blackstone, Kent, 



20 THE BEAST 

Parsons — working night and day — and I began 
really to get some sort of "grasp of the law." 
Long before I had passed my examinations and 
been called to the bar,. Mr. Thompson would give 
me demurrers to argue in court ; and, having been 
told that I had only a pretty poor sort of legal 
mind. I worked twice as hard to make up for my 
deficiencies. I argued my first case, a damage 
suit, when I was nineteen. And at last there 
happened one of those lucky turns common in 
jury cases, and it set me on my feet. 

A man had been held by the law on several 
counts of obtaining goods under false pretences. 
He had been tried on the first count by an assist- 
ant district attorney, and the jury had acquitted 
him. He had been tried on the second count by 
another assistant, who was one of our great crim- 
inal lawyers, and the jury had disagreed. There 

a a debate as to whether it was worth while to 
try him for a third time, and I proposed that I 
should take the case, since I had been working 
on it and thought there was still a chance of con- 
victing him. They let me have my way, and 
though the evidence in the third charge was the 
same as before — except as to the person defrauded 
— the jury, by good luck, found against him. It 
was the turning point in my struggle. It gave me 
confidence in myself; and it taught me never to 
give up. 

And now I began to come upon "the Cat" again. 



FINDING THE CAT 21 

I knew a lad named Smith, whom I considered 
a victim of malpractice at the hands of a Denver 
surgeon whose brother was at the head of one of 
the great smelter companies of Colorado. The 
boy had suffered a fracture of the thigh-bone, and 
the surgeon — because of a hasty and ill-consid- 
ered diagnosis, I believed — had treated him for 
a bruised hip. The surgeon, when I told him that 
the boy was entitled to damages, called me a 
blackmailer — and that was enough. I forced the 
case to trial. 

I had resigned my clerkship and gone into part- 
nership with a fine young fellow whom I shall call 
Charles Gardener* — though that was not his 
name — and this was to be our first case. We 
were opposed by Charles J. Hughes, Jr., the 
ablest corporation lawyer in the state; and I was 
puzzled to find the officers of the gas company 
and a crowd of prominent business men in court 
when the case was argued on a motion to dis- 
miss it. The judge refused the motion, and for 
so doing — as he afterward told me himself — 
he was "cut" in his Club by the men whose pres- 
ence in the court had puzzled me. After a three 
weeks' trial, in which we worked night and day 
for the plaintiff — with X-ray photographs and 
medical testimony and fractured bones boiled out 
over night in the medical school where I prepared 

♦This is one of the few fictitious names used in the story. Judge Lind- 
sey wishes it disguised "for old sake's sake." 



22 THE BEAST 

them — the jury stood eleven to one in our favour, 
and the case had to be begun all over again. The 
second time, after another trial of three weeks, 
the jury "hung" again, but we did not give up. 
It had been all fun for us — and for the town. 
The word had gone about the streets: "Go up 
and see those two kids fighting the corporation 
heavyweights. It's more fun than a circus." 
And we were confident that we could win; we 
knew that we were right. 

One evening after dinner, when we were sitting 
in the dingy little back room on Champa Street 
that served us as an office, A. M. Stevenson — 
"Big Steve" — politician and attorney for the 
Denver City Tramway Company, came shoulder- 
ing in to see us — a heavy-jowled, heavy-waisted, 
red-faced bulk of good-humour — looking as if he 
had just walked out of a political cartoon. "Hello, 
boys," he said jovially. " How's she going ? Mak- 
ing a record for yourselves up in court, eh ? Making 
a record for yourselves. Well!" 

He sat down and threw a foot up on the desk 
and smiled at us, with his inevitable cigarette in 
his mouth — his ridiculously inadequate cigarette. 
(When he puffed it, he looked like a fat boy blow- 
ing bubbles.) "Wearing yourselves out, eh? 
Working night and day ? Ain't you getting about 
tired of it?" 

"We got eleven to one each time," I said. 
"We'll win yet" 



FINDING THE CAT 23 

"Uh-huh. You will, eh?" He laughed amusedly. 
" One man stood out against you each time, wasn't 
there?" 

There was. 

"Well," he said, "there always will be. You 
ain't going to get a verdict in this case. You 
can't. Now I'm a friend of you boys, ain't I? 
Well, my advice to you is you'd better settle that 
case. Get something for your work. Don't be 
a pair of fools. Settle it." 

" Why can't we get a verdict ?" we asked. 

He winked a fat eye. "Jury'll hang. Every 
time. I'm here to tell you so. Better settle it."* 

We refused to. What was the use of courts if 
we could not get justice for this crippled boy? 
What w T as the use of practising law if we could 
not get a verdict on evidence that would convince 
a blind man ? Settle it ? Never ! 

So they went to our client and persuaded the 
boy to give up. 

"Big Steve," attorney for the tramway com- 
pany! The gas company's officers in court! The 
business men insulting the judge in his Club! 
The defendant's brother at the head of one of 
the smelter companies! I began to "connect 
up" "the Cat." 

Gardener and I held a council of war. If it 



♦Many of the conversations reported in this volume are given from 
memory, and they are liable to errors of memory in the use of a word or 
a turn of expression. But they are not liable to error in substance. They 
are the unadorned truth, clearly recollected. B. B. L. 



-24 THE BEAST 

was possible for these men to "hang" juries 
whenever they chose, there was need of a law to 
make something less than a unanimous decision 
by a jury sufficient to give a verdict in civil cases. 
Colorado needed a "three-fourths jury law/' 
Gardener was a popular young man, a good 
"mixer/' a member of several fraternal orders, a 
hail-fellow-well-met. and as interested as I was 
in politics. He had been in the insurance busi- 
ness before he took up law, and he had friends 
everywhere. Why should he not go into politics? 
— as he had often spoken of doing. 

In the intervals of the Smith suit, we had had a 
case in which a mother, whose child had been 
killed by a street car. had been unable to recover 
damages from the tramway company, because 
the company claimed, under the law, that her 
child was worthless alive or dead: and there was 
need of a statute permitting such as she to recover 
damage- for distress and anguish of mind. We 
had had another case in which a young factory 
worker had been injured by the bursting of an 
emery wheel: and the law held that the boy was 
guilty of "contributory negligence v ' because he 
had continued to work at the wheel after he had 
found a flaw m it — although he had had no 
choice except to work at it or leave the factory 
and And employment elsewhere. There was need 
of a lav," giving workmen better protection in such 
circumstances. Whv should not Gardener enter 



FINDING THE CAT 25 

the Legislature and introduce these bills ? — which 
I was eager to draft. Why not, indeed! The 
state needed them; the people wanted them; the 
courts were crippled and justice w r as balked 
because of the lack of them. Here was an 
opportunity for worthy ambition to serve the 
community and help his fellow-man. 

That night, with all the high hopes and gener- 
ous ideals and merciful ignorance of youth, we 
decided — without knowing what we were about — 
to go into the jungle and attack the Beast! 



CHAPTER II 

THE CAT PURRS 

DENVER was then, as it is now, a beautiful 
city, built on a slope, between the prairies 
and mountains, always sunny, cool and clear- 
skyed, with the very sparkle of happiness in its 
air; and on the crown of its hill, facing the roman- 
tic prospect of the Rockies, the State Capitol 
raised its dome — as proud as the ambition of a 
liberty-loving people — the symbol of an aspira- 
tion and the expression of its power. That Capi- 
tol, I confess, was to me a sort of granite temple 
erected by the Commonwealth of Colorado to law, 
to justice, to the ideals of self-government that 
have made our republic the promised land of all 
the oppressed of Europe; and I could conceive 
of no nobler work than to serve those ideals in 
the assembly halls of that building, with those 
eternal mountains on the horizon and that sun 
of freedom overhead. Surely a man may confess 
so much, without shame, of his youth and his 
inexperience. . . It is not merely the gold on 
the dome of the Capitol that has given it another 
look to me now. 

It was the year 1897. I was about twenty- 

26 



THE CAT PURRS 27 

eight years old, and my partner, Gardener, was 
three years younger. He was more worldly-wise 
than I was, even then; for while I had been busy 
with briefs and court-work, he had been the 
"business head" ' of the firm, out among business 
friends and acquaintances — "mixing/' as they 
say — and through his innumerable connections, 
here and there, with this man and that fraternity, 
bringing in the cases that kept us employed. He 
was a "Silver Republican"; I, a Democrat. 
But we both knew that if he was to get into politics 
it must be with the backing of the party "organi- 
zation" and the endorsement of the party "boss." 
The "Silver Republican" boss of the day was 
a man whom we both admired — George Graham. 
Everybody admired him. Everybody was fond 
of him. "Why," they would tell you, "there 
isn't a man in town who is kinder to his family. 
He's such a good man in his home! And he's 
so charitable!" At Christmas time, when free 
baskets of food were distributed to the poor, 
George Graham w r as chairman of the committee 
for their distribution. He was prominent in the 
fraternal orders and used his political power to 
help the needy, the widow and the orphan. He 
had an engaging manner of fellowship, a personal 
magnetism, a kindly interest in aspiring young 
men, a pleasant appearance — smooth and dark 
in complexion, with a gentle w T ay of smiling. I 
liked him; and he seemed to discover an affection 



28 THE BEAST 

for both Gardener and me, as we became more 
intimate with him, in the course of Gardener's pro- 
gress toward his coveted nomination by the party. 
That progress was so rapid and easy that it 
surprised us. We knew, of course, that we had 
attracted some public attention and much news- 
paper notice by our legal battles with "the cor- 
poration heavy weights'' in our three big cases 
against the surgeon, the tramway company and 
the factory owner. But this did not account to 
us for the ease with which Gardener penetrated 
to the inner circles of the Boss's court. It did 
not explain why Graham should come to see us 
in our office, and call us by our first names. The 
explanation that we tacitly accepted was one 
more personal and flattering to us. And when 
Gardener would come back from a chat with 
Graham, full of "inside information" about the 
party's plans — about who was to be nominated 
for this office at the coming convention, and what 
chance So-and-so had for that one — the sure 
proofs (to us) that he was being admitted to the 
intimate secrets of the party and found worthy 
of the confidence of those in power — I was as 
proud of Gardener as only a young man can be of 
a friend who has all the brilliant qualities that he 
himself lacks. Gardener was a handsome fellow, 
well built, always well dressed, self-assured and 
ambitious; I did not wonder that the politicians 
admired him and made much of him. I accepted 



THE CAT PURRS 29 

his success as a tribute to those qualities in him 
that had already attached me to him with an 
affection rather more than brotherly. 

We said nothing to the politicians about our 
projected bills. Indeed, from the first, my interest 
in our measures of reform was greater than Gar- 
dener's. His desire to be in the Legislature was 
due to a natural ambition to "get on" in life, to 
acquire power in the community as well as the 
wealth and distinction that come with power. 
Such ambitions were, of course, beyond me; I 
had none of the qualities that would make them 
possible; and I could only enjoy them, as it were, 
by proxy, in Gardener's person. I enjoyed, in 
the same way, his gradual penetration behind 
the scenes in politics. I saw, with him, that the 
party convention, to which we had at first looked 
as the source of honours, was really only a sort of 
puppet show of which the Boss held the wires. 
All the candidates for nomination were selected 
by Graham in advance — in secret caucus with 
his ward leaders, executive committeemen and 
such other "practical" politicians as "Big Steve" 
— and the convention, with more or less show of 
independence, did nothing but ratify his choice. 
When I spoke 1 of canvassing some of the chosen 
delegates of the convention, Gardener said: 
"What's the use of talking to those small fry? 
If we can get the big fellows, we've got the rest. 
They do what the big ones tell them — and won't 



30 THE BEAST 

do anything they aren't told. You leave it to 
me." I had only hoped to see him in the Lower 
House, but he, with his wiser audacity, soon pro- 
claimed himself a candidate for the Senate. "We 
can get the big thing as easy as the little one," he 
said. "I'm going to tell Graham it's the Senate 
or nothing for me." And he got his promise. 
And when we knew, at last, that his name was 
really on "the slate" of candidates to be presented 
to the convention, we were ready to throw up our 
hats and cheer for ourselves — and for the Boss. 

The convention met in September, 1898. There 
had been a fusion of Silver Republicans, Demo- 
crats, and Populists, that year, and the political 
offices had been apportioned out among the 
faithful machine-men of these parties. Gardener 
was nominated by "Big Steve," in a eulogistic 
speech that was part of the farce; and the con- 
vention ratified the nomination with the unanimity 
of a stage mob. We knew that his election was 
as sure as sunrise, and I set to work looking up 
models for my bills with all the enthusiasm of the 
first reformer. 

Meanw r hile there was the question of the cam- 
paign and of the campaign expenses. Gardener 
had been assessed $500 by the committee as his 
share of the legitimate costs of the election, and 
Boss Graham generously offered to get the money 
for him "from friends." We were rather inclined 
to let Graham do so, feeling a certain delicacy 



THE CAT PURRS 31 

about refusing his generosity and being aware, 
too, that we were not millionaires. But Graham 
was not the only one who made the offer; for 
example, Ed. Chase, since head of the gambler's 
syndicate in Denver, made similar proposals of 
kindly aid; and we decided, at last, that perhaps 
it would be well to be quite independent. Our 
law practice was improving. Doubtless, it would 
continue to improve now that we were "in right " 
with the political powers. We put up $250 each 
and paid the assessment. 

The usual business of political rallies, mass- 
meetings and campaign speeches followed in due 
course, and in November, 1898, Gardener was 
elected a State Senator on the fusion ticket. I 
had been busy with my "three-fourths jury" bill, 
studying the constitution of the State of Colorado, 
comparing it with those of the other states, and 
making myself certain that such a law as we pro- 
posed was possible. Unlike most of the state 
constitutions, Colorado's preserved inviolate the 
right of jury trial in criminal cases only, and there- 
fore it seemed to me that the Legislature had 
plenary power to regulate it in civil suits. I found 
that the Supreme Court of the state had so decided 
in two cases, and I felt very properly elated; there 
seemed to be nothing to prevent us having a law 
that should make "hung" juries practically impos- 
sible in Colorado and relieve the courts of an 
abuse that thwarted justice in scores of cases. At 



32 THE BEAST 

the same time I prepared a bill allowing parents 
to recover damages for "anguish of mind" when 
a child of theirs was killed in an accident; and, 
after much study, I worked up an "employer's 
liability" bill to protect men who were compelled 
by necessity to work under needlessly dangerous 
conditions. With these three bills in his pocket, 
Senator Gardener went up to the Capitol, like 
another David, and I went joyfully with him to 
aid and abet. 

Happy? I was as happy as if Gardener had 
been elected President and I was to be his Secre- 
tary of State. I was as happy as a man who has 
found his proper work and knows that it is for 
the good of his fellows. I would not have changed 
places that day with any genius of the fine arts 
who had three masterpieces to unveil to an admir- 
ing world. 

I did not know, of course — but I was soon to 
learn — that the Legislature's time was almost 
wholly taken up with the routine work of govern- 
ment, that most of the bills passed were concerned 
with appropriations and such necessary details 
of administration, and that only twenty or thirty 
bills such as ours — dealing with other matters — 
could possibly be passed, among the hundreds 
offered. It was Boss Graham who warned us 
that we had better concentrate on one measure, if 
we wished to succeed with any at all, and we 
decided to put all our strength behind the " three- 



THE CAT PURRS 33 

fourths jury " bill. Since Graham seemed to doubt 
its constitutionality, I went to the Attorney General 
for his opinion, and he referred me to his assistant 
— whom I convinced. I came back with the 
assistant's decision that the Legislature had power 
to pass such a law, and Gardener promptly intro- 
duced it in the Senate. 

It proved at once mildly unpopular, and after 
a preliminary debate, in which the senators rather 
laughed at it as visionary and unconstitutional, it 
was referred to the Attorney General for his 
opinion. We waited, confidently. To our amaze- 
ment he reported it unconstitutional, and the very 
assistant who had given me a favourable opinion 
before, now conducted the case against it. Noth- 
ing daunted, Gardener fought to get it referred 
to the Supreme Court, under the law; and the 
Senate sent it there. I got up an elaborate brief, 
had it printed at our expense, and spent a day in 
arguing it before the Supreme Court judges. They 
held that the Court had already twice found the 
Legislature possessed of plenary powers in such 
matters, and Gardener brought the bill back 
into the Senate triumphantly, and got a favourable 
report from the Judiciary Committee. 

By this time, Boss Graham was seriously 
alarmed. He had warned Gardener that the bill 
was distasteful to him and to those whom he called 
his "friends." It was particularly distasteful, 
it seemed, to the Denver City Tramway Company. 



34 THE BEAST 

And he could promise, he said, that if we dropped 
the bill, the railway company would see that we 
got at least four thousand dollars' worth of liti- 
gation a year to handle. To both Gardener and 
myself, flushed with success and roused to the 
battle, this offer seemed an amusing confession 
of defeat on the part of the opposition; and we 
went ahead more gaily than ever. 

We were enjoying ourselves. If we had been 
a pair of chums in college, we could not have had 
a better time. Whenever I could get away from 
my court cases and my office work, I rushed up 
to watch the fight in the Senate, as eagerly as a 
Freshman hurrying from his studies to see his 
athletic room-mate carry everything before him 
in a football game. The whole atmosphere of 
the Capitol — with its corridors of coloured marble, 
its vistas of arch and pillar, its burnished metal 
balustrades, its great staircases — all its majesty 
of rich grandeur and solidity of power — affected 
me with an increased respect for the functions of 
government that were discharged there and for 
the men who had them to discharge. I felt the 
reflection of that importance beaming upon myself 
when I was introduced as " Senator Gardener's 
law partner, sir"; and I accepted the bows and 
greetings of lobbyists and legislators with all the 
pleasure in the world. 

When Gardener got our bill up for its final 
reading in the Senate, I was there to watch, and 



THE CAT PURRS 35 

it tickled me to the heart to see him. He made a 
fine figure of an orator, the handsomest man in 
the Senate; and he was not afraid to raise his 
voice and look as independent and determined 
as his words. He had given the senators to 
understand that any one who opposed his bill 
would have him as an obstinate opponent on 
every other measure; and the Senate evidently 
realized that it would be wise to let him have his 
way. The bill was passed. But it had to go 
through the Lower House, too, and it was sent 
there, to be taken care of by its opponents — 
with the tongue in the cheek, no doubt. 

I met Boss Graham in the corridor. "Hello, 
Ben," he greeted me. "What's the matter with 
that partner of yours?" I laughed; he looked 
worried. "Come in here," he said. "I'd like 
to have a talk with you." He led me into a quiet 
side room and shut the door. "Now look here," 
he said. "Did you boys ever stop to think what 
a boat you'll be in with this law that you're trying 
to get, if you ever have to defend a corporation 
in a jury suit ? Now they tell me, down at the 
tramway offices" — the offices of the Denver City 
Tramway Company — "that they're going to need 
a lot more legal help. There's every prospect 
that they'll appoint you boys assistant counsel. 
But they can't expect to do much, even with you 
bright boys as counsel, if they have this law against 
them. You know that all the money there is in 



36 THE BEAST 

law is in corporation business. I don't see what 
you're fighting for." 

I explained, as well as I could, that we were 
fighting for the bill because we thought it was 
right — that it was needed. He did not seem to 
believe me; he objected that this sort of talk was 
not "practical." 

"Well," I ended, "we've made up our minds 
to put it through. And we're going to try." 

"You'll find you're making a mistake, boy," he 
warned me. " You'll find you're making a mistake." 

We laughed over it together — Gardener and I. 
It was another proof to us that we had our oppon- 
ents on their knees. We thought we understood 
Graham's position in the matter; he had made 
no disguise of the fact that he was intimate and 
friendly with Mr. William G. Evans — the great 
"Bill" Evans — head of the tramway company 
and an acknowledged power in politics. And it 
was natural to us that Graham should do what he 
could to induce us to spare his friends. That 
was all very well, but we had made no pledges; 
we were under no obligations to any one except 
the public whom we served. Gardener was 
making himself felt, and he intended to continue 
to make himself felt. He did not intend to 
stultify himself, even for Graham's good "friends." 
I, of course, went along with him, rejoicing. 

He had another bill in hand (House Bill 235) 
to raise the tax on large foreign insurance com- 



THE CAT PURRS 37 

panies so as to help replenish the depleted treasury 
of the state. Governor Thomas had been appeal- 
ing for money; the increased tax was conceded 
to be just, and it would add at least $100,000 in 
revenue to the public coffers. Gardener handled 
it well in the Senate, and — though we were 
indirectly offered a bribe of $2,500 to drop it — he 
got it passed and returned it to the Lower House. 
He had two other bills — one our "anguish of 
mind" provision and the second a bill regulating 
the telephone companies; but he was not able to 
move them out of committee. The opposition was 
silent but solid. 

It became my duty to watch the two bills that 
we had been able to get as far as the House calendar 
on final passage — to see that they w r ere given 
their turn for consideration. The jury bill came 
to the top very soon, but it was passed over, and 
next day it was on the bottom of the list. This 
happened more than once. And once it dis- 
appeared from the calendar altogether. The 
Clerk of the House, when I demanded an explana- 
tion, said that it was an oversight — a clerical 
error — and put it back at the foot. I began to 
suspect jugglery, but I was not yet sure of it. 

One day while I was on this sentry duty, a 
lobbyist who was a member of a fraternal ordei 
to which I belonged, came to me with the 
fraternal greeting and a thousand dollars in bills. 
"Lindsey," he said, "this is a legal fee for an 



38 THE BEAST 

argument we want you to make before the com- 
mittee, as a lawyer, against that insurance bill. 
It's perfectly legitimate. We don't want you to 
do anything except in a legal way. You know, 
our other lawyer has made an able argument, 
showing how the extra tax will come out of the 
people in increased premiums" — and so on. I 
refused the money and continued trying to push 
along the bill. In a few days he came back to 
me, with a grin. "Too bad you didn't take that 
money/' he said. "There's lots of it going round. 
But the joke of it is, I got the whole thing fixed up 
for 8250. Watch Cannon." I watched Cannon 
— Wilbur F. Cannon, a member of the House 
and a "'floor leader" there. He had already 
voted in favour of the bill. But — to anticipate 
somewhat the sequence of events — I saw Wilbur 
F. Cannon, in the confusion and excitement of 
the closing moments of the session, rush down the 
aisle toward the Speaker's chair and make a motion 
concerning the insurance bill — to what effect I 
could not hear. The motion was put. in the midst 
of the uproar, and declared carried; and the bill 
was killed. It was killed so neatly that there is 
to-day no record of its decease in the official 
account of the proceedings of the House! Expert 
treason, bold and skilful! * 

Meanwhile, I had been standing by our jury 
bill. It went up and it went down on the calendar, 

♦Wilbur F Cannon is now Pure Food Commissioner in Colorado. 



THE CAT PURRS 39 

and at last when it arrived at a hearing it was 
referred back to the Judiciary Committee with 
two other anti-corporation bills. The session 
was drawing toward the day provided by the 
constitution for its closing, and we could no longer 
doubt that we were being juggled out of our last 
chance by the Clerk and the Speaker — who was 
Mr. William G. Smith, since known as "Tramway 
Bill."* 

"All right/' Gardener said. "Not one of 
Speaker Smith's House bills will get through the 
Senate until he lets our jury bill get to a vote." 
He told Speaker Smith w T hat he intended to do, 
and next day he began to do it. 

That afternoon, tired out, I w r as resting, during 
a recess of the House, in a chair that stood in a 
shadowed corner, when the Speaker hurried by 
heavily, evidently unaware of me, and rang a 
telephone. I heard him mention the name of " Mr. 
Evans," in a low, husky voice. I heard, sleepily, 
not consciously listening; and I did not at first con- 
nect "Mr. Evans" with William G. Evans of the 
tramway company. But a little later I heard the 
Speaker say: "Well, unless Gardener can be 
pulled off, we'll have to let that 'three-fourths' 
bill out. He's raising hell with a lot of our meas- 
ures over in the Senate. . . . What ? . . . 
Yes. . . . Well, get at it pretty quick." 

Those hoarse, significant words wakened me 

♦Smith is now tax agent in the tramway offices. 



40 THE BEAST 

like the thrill of an electric shock — wakened me 
to an understanding of the strength of the "special 
interests" that were opposed to us — and wakened 
in me, too, the anger of a determination to fight 
to a finish. The Powers that had "fixed" our 
juries, were now fixing the Legislature. They had 
laughed at us in the courts; they were going to 
laugh at us in the Capitol! 

Speaker Smith came lumbering out. He was 
a heavily built man, with a big jaw. And when 
he saw me there, confronting him, his face changed 
from a look of displeased surprise to one of angry 
contempt — lowering his head like a bull — as if 

he were saying to himself: " What! That d 

little devil! I'll bet he heard me!" But he did 
not speak. And neither did I. He went off 
about whatever business he had in hand, and I 
caught up my hat and hastened to Gardener to 
tell him what I had heard. 

When the House met again, in committee of 
the whole, the Speaker, of course, was not in the 
Chair, and Gardener found him in the lobby. 
Gardener had agreed with me to say nothing of 
the telephone conversation, but he threatened 
Smith that unless our jury bill was "reported out" 
by the Judiciary Committee and allowed to come 
to a vote, he would oppose every House bill in 
the Senate and talk the session to death. Smith 
fumed and blustered, but Gardener, with the 
blood in his face, out-blustered and out-fumed 



THE CAT PURRS 41 

him. The Speaker, later in the day, vented some 
of his spleen by publicly threatening to eject me 
from the floor of the House as a lobbyist. But 
he had to allow the bill to come up, and it was 
finally passed, with very little opposition — for 
reasons which I was afterward to understand. 

It had yet to be signed by the Speaker; and it 
had to be signed before the close of the session or 
it could not become a law. I heard rumours that 
some anti-corporation bills were going to be 
"lost" by the Chief Clerk, so that they might not 
be signed; and I kept my eye on him. He was 
a fat-faced, stupid-looking, flabby creature — 
by name D. H. Dickason — who did not appear 
capable of doing anything very daring. I saw 
the chairman of the Enrolling Committee place 
our bill on Dickason's desk, among those waiting 
for the Speaker's signature ; and — while the 
House was busy — I withdrew it from the pile 
and placed it to one side, conspicuously, so that 
I could see it from a distance. 

When the time came for signing — sure enough ! 
— the Clerk was missing, and some bills were 
missing with him. The House was crowded — 
floor and galleries — and the whole place went 
into an uproar at once. Nobody seemed to know 
which bills were gone; every member who had an 
anti-corporation bill thought it was his that had 
been stolen; and they all together broke out into 
denunciations of the Speaker, the Clerk and every- 



42 THE BEAST 

body else whom they thought concerned in the 
outrage. One man jumped up on his chair and 
tried to dominate the pandemonium, shouting 
and waving his hands. The galleries went wild 
with noisy excitement. Men threatened each 
other with violence on the floor of the House, 
cursing and shaking their fists. Others rushed 
here and there trying to find some trace of the 
Clerk. The Speaker, breathless from calling for 
order and pounding with his gavel, had to sit 
down and let them rage. 

At last, from my place by the wall, on the out- 
skirts of the hubbub, I saw the Clerk dragged 
down the aisle by the collar, bleeding, with a 
blackened eye, apparently half drunk and evi- 
dently frightened into an abject terror. He had 
stolen a bill introduced by Senator Bucklin, pro- 
viding that cities could own their own water works 
and gas works; but the Senator's wife had been 
watching him; she had followed him to the base- 
ment and stopped him as he tried to escape to the 
street; and it was the Senator now who had him 
by the neck. 

They thrust him back into his chair, got the 
confusion quieted, and with muttered threats of 
the penitentiary for him and everybody concerned 
in the affair, thev got back to business again with 
the desperate haste of men working against time. 
And our jury bill was signed! 

It was signed; and we had won! (At least we 



THE CAT PURRS 43 

thought so.) And I walked out of the crowded 
glare of the session's close, into an April midnight 
that was as wide as all eternity and as quiet. It 
seemed to me that the stars, even in Colorado, 
had never been brighter; they sparkled in the 
clear blackness of the sky with a joyful brilliancy. 
A cool breeze drew down from the mountains as 
peacefully as the breath in sleep. It was a night 
to make a man take off his hat and breathe out 
his last vexation in a sigh. 

We had won. What did it matter that the Boss, 
the Speaker, the Clerk and so many more of these 
miserable creatures were bought and sold in self- 
ishness? That spring night seemed to answer 
for it that the truth and beauty of the world were 
as big above them as the heavens that arched so 
high above the puny dome-light of the Capitol. 
Had not even we, two "boys" — as they called 
us — put a just law before them and made them 
take up the pen and sign it ? If we had done so 
much without even a whisper from the people 
and scarcely a line from the public press to aid 
and back us, what would the future not do when 
we found the help that an aroused community 
would surely give us ? Hope ? The whole night 
was hushed and peaceful with hope. The very 
houses that I passed — walking home up the tree- 
lined streets — seemed to me in some way so quiet 
because they were so sure. All was right with 
the world. We had won. 



CHAPTER III 

THE CAT KEEPS ON PURRING 

THE fact, of course, was that we had won 
nothing. Our precious jury law was soon 
taken to the Supreme Court, on an appeal from a 
damage suit, and the judges declared it uncon- 
stitutional, without any blushing apologies for 
reversing previous decisions. But this blow did 
not fall until after an interval of some months; 
and Gardener and I, resting on our scanty 
laurels meanwhile, were allowed to reconsider 
the incidents of the session and count our 
bruises. 

Gardener had had one hard knock, scarcely 
noticed in the fury and heat of the fight, but now 
sorely painful. Boss Graham had given him to 
understand, more or less plainly, that if he intended 
to continue his career in politics as he had begun it, 
he need not look for any further support from the 
Republican machine in Denver. Elections cost 
money; the money had to come from those who 
were able to subscribe it; and the Republican 
machine could not afford to offend such liberal 
subscribers as Mr. Evans of the tramway com- 
pany, Mr. Field of the telephone company, Mr. 

44 



THE CAT KEEPS ON PURRING 45 

Cheesman of the water company, the insurance 
magnates and the rest of the "Powers." 

I do not know that the ultimatum was expressed 
even so delicately as this ; but it was an ultimatum, 
and the more Gardener thought of it and talked 
to me about it, the more disheartened he became. 
He had one more term to serve in the Senate 
— and then what ? Why then simply extinction — 
the end of his political career. It was as useless 
to appeal from the Boss to the convention, in 
those days, as to turn from a man to ask aid from 
his shadow. And to go to the people? To ask 
assistance from the public whom we had tried 
to serve ? We might as well have rushed out into 
the street, from the decision of the Supreme Court, 
and called to the passers-by to come in and reverse 
the rulings of the judges. The people had handed 
over their political powers to the convention and 
the Boss as surely as they had delegated their 
judicial functions to the courts. 

What were we to do then? I did not know. 
My own inclination was simply to fight — not 
because I saw any prospect of succeeding, but 
because I enjoyed the "scrap." Fight for the 
fun of it — fight for exercise — fight for any 
reason — but fight ! We had our law practice to 
support us. We were not dependent upon politics 
for our living. We could make reform our hobby 
and keep the joy of political battle as a sort of 
recreation for our after-hours. 



46 THE BEAST 

Gardener shook his head over it, and we went 
back to our practice. A very interesting develop- 
ment of events began at once to open on us. 

Some months earlier, Boss Graham had brought 
us a case to defend, and he had brought it from 
the offices of the Denver City Tramway Company. 
It involved a charge of assault against a street- 
car conductor, and nothing more; and we under- 
took to defend the conductor. But the trial came 
on during the last days of the legislative session; 
an evening newspaper was scoring the tramway 
company viciously in its columns; and we, as 
attorneys for the defence, shared in the printed 
abuse of the company. 

Here was a situation in which I did not relish 
finding myself. "Don't worry," Graham said. 
" They're just blackmailers — trying to hold up 
the company." "But," I protested, "they'll prej- 
udice the jury against us." "Don't worry," he 
said. "You can't lose. The jury'll hang." This 
was even less to my taste. We were not only 
being set up publicly as co-partners in corruption 
with the very corporation that we had been attack- 
ing, but we were actually being compelled to profit 
by the jury fixing for which we had assailed the 
corporation. I could not make up my mind 
whether this was accidental or malicious; and I 
went through with the case. It ended in a hung 
jury. We received $500 from the tramway com- 
pany. 



THE CAT KEEPS ON PURRING 47 

I objected to Graham that $500 was too much 
— that we did not charge $500 for such cases. 
"But/' he said, with his suave smile, "you've 
helped them defeat a civil damage suit that would 
have taken a lot of the time of one of their leading 
counsel to defend." I accepted the explanation, 
though I knew it was not an explanation at all — 
for it was the hung jury and not we who had won 
the suit. But our jury law was to be tested before 
the Supreme Court, on an appeal from a damage 
suit; and I eased my conscience by telling Graham 
that if the Court found the law unconstitutional — 
as he seemed to expect it would — Senator Gar- 
dener intended to propose, at the next session, a 
constitutional amendment permitting the passage 
of our law. 

Then I went to Gardener with my qualms about 
the whole case and the fee we had received for it. 
He pooh-poohed my squeamishness. "If they're 
fools enough to pay us more than the thing's 
worth," he argued, "that's their lookout. The 
more fools they! If we're going to fight these 
people, we've got to have money; haven't we? 
We've got to take every cent we can get. Don't 
be foolish. You're not practical. You never 
were. Leave the business end of it to me." 

Another case came to us, sent in by another 
corporation politician, and the defendant was the 
famous "Jim" Marshall, a well-known gambler 
and the very same man whom I had seen accused 



48 THE BEAST 

of conspiring with a police captain to rob an 
express train on the Denver and Rio Grande 
Railroad. In this case he was involved in a dis- 
pute about the lease of a gambling house; and 
though the city, at the time, was supposed to be 
"shut down tight" against all gambling, Marshall 
assured me that this was only a political ruse to 
deceive the "goody-goodies." It was "on the 
cards" to open up again very soon, and he wanted 
the house in readiness. 

I learned to like Marshall. He w^as a good- 
hearted, fearless man; and in the hands of any 
other system but that under which we lived, he 
might have been an invaluable man to the com- 
munity. We became the best of friends. I 
learned from him all I wished to know of the con- 
nection between the Beast, politics and the gam- 
blers; and what I learned made clear to me the 
real meaning of the struggle that I had seen 
between the old Police Board of Denver and 
" Bloody Bridles " Waite. 

We won Marshall's case for him; and without 
waiting for his bill, he sent us a fee of $1,000. 
Meanwhile, other corporation cases had been com- 
ing in — and bringing large fees. Gardener was 
jubilant. I became more and more uneasy. 
These people were not paying us — as I began 
to see — they were trying to buy us. They were 
using on us a system which they must have used 
on hundreds of young men in Denver, before and 



THE CAT KEEPS ON PURRING 49 

since — and not only in Denver, but in every city 
in every state in this Union where Business wishes 
"special privileges" and debauches the com- 
munity to obtain them. They were trying to 
buy us, and they were succeeding. Gardener 
was becoming cynical. I was, to him, more and 
more impractical. We discussed it and discussed 
it — sitting in our offices — (we had taken new ones 
on Lawrence and Seventeenth Street) — sitting of 
a Sunday afternoon on the porch of his little home 
(he was newly married) — walking up and down, 
of an evening, on the street — or wherever else 
we happened to have an idle and companionable 
moment together. 

I do not wish to be gossipy; but the situation 
was typical, and I wish it to be understood. It 
is easy enough to condemn the man who becomes 
the tool of the "interests"; and it is common 
enough to exult in his final disgrace and to con- 
gratulate the community on his punishment. But 
it is better to understand what he had to fight 
against, to appreciate the overwhelming odds he 
had against him in the struggle, to pity him, and 
to save for the men who ruined him the wrath 
that is wasted, now, upon their victim. 

I have written this story, thus far, very ill, if 
I have not let you see the good there was in 
Gardener. In our long companionship, he had 
attached me to him by every admiration that a 
man has for what is strong and capable. He 



50 THE BEAST 

was ambitious — but is that a crime ? He wished 
to be rich — and who does not? He was eager 
to take his place as a man of note among his 
neighbours, to have a career in politics, to be able 
to enjoy and to have his family enjoy the fruits of 
that career and the honours of its distinction. 
Are these the traits of a weakling? Or are they 
the very qualities that make for the usefulness of 
a strong man in an honest community? And 
yet it was even by these qualities that the Beast 
got him. It is by them that it holds him. It is 
because of them that he does its work to-day so 
well. 

"Why, Ben," he would say to me, "you know 
how things are in this town. We can't get a look 
in on anything if these big fellows don't want to 
let us. Their men are on the doors everywhere. 
Look at Graham. They own him, and you know 
it. And he has the say whether or not I'm ever 
to get another election to anything! Look at the 
courts. Those judges get their places through 
Graham, the same as I do. Look at the hung 
juries? You don't suppose they have to buy 
those juries, do you? The poor old dubs who 
wait around, up there, for a job on jury duty 
know who's who in this town. They want to 
stand in with the powers. They hang the jury in 
the hope that some of the big fellows will notice 
them and give them a soft thing up at the Court 
House or the Capitol. We're trying to buck up 



THE CAT KEEPS ON PURRING 51 

against the whole game. And what do we do it 
for? For 'the people/ The dear people! To 
hell with them. A good half of them are in this 
game themselves. They won't help us. They'll 
turn on us, quick as a cur, as soon as they get the 
word. And the other half doesn't know and 
doesn't want to know. They wouldn't believe 
us if we told them. They don't care. All they 
want is to make a living and keep out of trouble 
and not be bothered about 'politics/ . . . Our 
play is to keep quiet and get money and get 
known; and then, when we're Somebody, show 
these fellows where we're at. Just play the game 
a while. We can't do anything by raising a kick 
yet. They'll simply chuck us out and lock the 
doors." 

All this was surely true, and I could not deny 
it. Nevertheless, I had some sort of vague hope 
that we should not have to go that way, that per- 
haps things would turn out better than they seemed. 
I was impractical, as Gardener said, particularly in 
money matters. I had started out in my younger 
days as a grasping little miser, stinting myself for 
the very necessaries of life, and hoarding up every 
penny I could get. I had invested my savings in 
real estate during the Denver land boom; and 
then values declined; the boom collapsed; and 
after an agony of worry and apprehension, I lost 
everything. And I felt relieved. I felt as relieved 
as if I had wakened up from a nightmare to find 



52 THE BEAST 

a load of terror gone from my mind. With some 
sort of instinctive fear of financial affairs, I have 
never since been able to consider them as a wise 
man should. 

As I look back on Gardener's struggle now, I 
see that it was my own weakness, to some extent, 
that saved me. I had no more ambition to be 
rich, and for that reason the bribe that helped to 
buy Gardener did not properly tempt me. I had 
not his ambition to be prominent in politics; the 
law satisfied me — as it did not him — and I had 
gone into politics only to try to improve the laws. 
I had none of his personal aggressiveness and 
determination; I was content to drift along, 
hoping for the best. Yet this very hope was 
grounded in a silent disinclination to drift into 
any crookedness; and as Gardener went further 
and further along the path that was opened up 
to him by the favour of the "Powers," I found him 
getting further and further away from me. 

There is no need to trace, step by step and 
incident by incident, the misery of that gradual 
separation. It went on for months, and it went 
on in silence. I could not speak of it, for fear 
of facing the truth about it. Gardener was no 
hypocrite; that was part of his strength; and 
I did not wish to hear him say the things I hoped 
against. But I could not blink the facts for long. 
They kept coming to me from other people, from 
friends and acquaintances outside the office; and 



THE CAT KEEPS ON PURRING 53 

I saw that Gardener was accepting my silence as 
a consent to the use of the firm in the service of 
the "interests." I could not go on accepting 
their fees. A break between Gardener and me 
was inevitable. I had to face it. 

I faced it alone, in my office, one day that I 
shall never forget — looking out the window at 
a sunset that was beautiful on the mountain peaks. 
Gardener had cried: "Let them say w T hat they 
like. Let them call me a 'tool/ I don't care. 
I'm going to play the game and play it to win — 
and there's only one way to do it — and that's 
to sit in with them." I could not answer him. 
I could only say that I would share in no more 
corporation fees. 

From his point of view he was right; and my 
own point of view, I knew, was too vague and 
impractical to argue with him. He had all the 
evidence, |[all the tangible proofs, on his side; 
and I had nothing but a sort of formless hope in 
the right, a feeling of conscience that I could not 
voice, a silent reluctance to sell myself even to 
"gain the whole w^orld." They had taken him 
up to the mountain top and shown him all the 
kingdoms of the earth — and he had gone from 
me as irrevocably as the past in which we had 
struggled so happily together. 

A sunset, at such a moment, is a sad thing to 
watch. It was carrying away with it all that 
companionship of youth, all that camaraderie in 



54 THE BEAST 

hope and idealism in which we had lived. It was 
leaving me with nothing but bitter memories and 
a failure that almost precluded hope. And yet 
there burned in the sky a colour of wrath that 
burned in me too in a hate for the men whom we 
had fought. Nothing was sacred to them. No 
one was too low for them. Laws and courts, 
judges and juries, politicians and gamblers, the 
Speaker in his Chair and the poor fallen creatures 
on the street — they debauched them all and 
bought and sold them all. And the youth who 
had ideals, who had intellect and ambition — he, 
too — they must have him. They must have 
new tools, strong tools, to replace the ones they 
wore out and cast aside. They had taken Gar- 
dener. He had gone. If they had done nothing 
else, that alone would have been enough to make 
me swear never to forgive them, never to vield 
to them — to make me resolve to oppose them, to 
thwart them in whatever small way might be in my 
small power — to make me fight in any sort of 
forlorn hope that some time I should see "a new 
birth of freedom'' like a clean day arising upon 
us, on our city, on our Capitol, on our mountains 
that I watched there, almost through tears, as 
they grew more and more sombre witn the fall of 
night. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE BEAST IN THE DEMOCRACY 

MEANWHILE I had thought I saw that new 
birth coming in the rejuvenation of the 
Democratic party under Bryan, in 1900. I really 
had thought so. I had learned that the Republican 
machine represented nothing but the rich cor- 
porations of the city and the state ; and I naturally 
concluded that the Democracy, being opposed 
to that machine, was opposed also to the owners 
of it. I knew that "Tom" Maloney, then the 
Democratic boss, was reputed to be in the pay of 
the gas company, but there was an attempt being 
made to oust Maloney, and I believed that if he 
and his henchmen could be gotten rid of, the 
party would be purged of all uncleanness and we 
might "raise a standard to which the wise and the 
honest might repair." Under such a standard, 
backed by the power of a people's party, we 
could elect an honest Legislature and pass the 
anti-corporation laws that the community needed. 
I took up my hope again. I volunteered my 
services to the opponents of Maloney. 

They were led by Governor Thomas and 
Boss Speer — Robert W. Speer, who comes into 

55 



56 THE BEAST 

my story, here, to stay. He was then the presi- 
dent of the Fire and Police Board of Denver, 
and he was recognized already as an astute 
politician, very smooth and very powerful. He 
was a man nearly six feet in height, unusually 
weighty, with a round, clean-shaven face of 
heavy muscles — with his thin hair trained 
over his increasing baldness — his skin fresh, 
his eyes clear, his mouth strong-jawed and firm. 
He had called a meeting of Governor Thomas's 
friends in his own real-estate office downtown, 
one evening, and I attended, sat in a leather 
chair, joined in the discussion and was appointed 
"precinct committeeman'' of the district in which 
I lived. 

I was in the battle again — if only in the ranks 
— and I was happy. 

My district was a fashionable quarter, on Capitol 
Hill, where the well-to-do citizens of Denver have 
built their residences and their coach houses, 
laid out their rolled lawns and planted their 
shade trees. It had always been an overwhelm- 
ingly Republican district, and I thought I knew 
why. But I argued that though the rich owners 
of these houses were naturally of the party of the 
"interests/ 5 their servants would not necessarily 
be so; and when, in my house-to-house canvass, 
I was refused admittance at a front door I went 
to the back one, and talked to the coachman, 
the cook, the furnace man and the servant girl 



THE BEAST IN THE DEMOCRACY 57 

about the iniquities of Boss Maloney, the crimes 
of the "interests" and the new hope there was 
of an honest party of the people to give us just 
laws and decent government in Denver. (We had 
female suffrage in Colorado even then, of course.) 

I always got a much more respectful hearing 
in the servants' hall than I did in the parlour. 
When I got any hearing at all from the master 
or mistress of the house it was usually a cynical 
or an indifferent one. I was amazed to find how 
many people did not vote, and were proud of it 
— how many would reply, "You can't tell me that 
one party is any better than another; they're 
all a lot of thieves together" — how many would 
listen with a "what's-the-use" expression that 
made me feel I was merely a bore. One curt 
old doctor, as soon as he heard what I had come 
for, slammed the door in my face and left me to 
finish my explanations to his brass name-plate. 
However, my work was not wasted. At our 
party's primary, I heard one of my opponents 
say, "Good heavens! Lindsey's got all the ser- 
vant girls in the country here." I defeated 
Maloney's man. And, finally, at the elections, 
I had the satisfaction of seeing the Republican 
majority in our district largely reduced. 

I do not intend to give here all the tiresome 
details of the fight between the Maloney fac- 
tion and the Speer faction. Having rather dis- 
tinguished myself by my success in the primaries, 



58 THE BEAST 

I was elected a Speer delegate to the local con- 
vention, and I helped to pick candidates for the 
Legislature who should cast their votes for Gov- 
ernor Thomas as United States Senator. I 
became chairman of the Credential Committee 
in the Democratic County Convention, and was 
then made secretary of the delegation to the State 
Convention. All this gave me considerable prom- 
inence and a good deal of influence; but it showed 
me a near view of more political obliquity than 
I had expected to see in our party. I found, for 
example, that the men with whom I was work- 
ing were thinking only of the spoils of office that 
would accrue to them if they won. I heard one 
man, who was a city inspector, say: "My job's 
only worth $1,500 salary, but I easily make 
$3,000 on the side" — in graft, of course. In 
answer to some moral objections to the candidacy 
of a very corrupt and dissolute man for a place 
on the ticket, one of the politicians replied: "Oh, 
you can put any kind of yellow dog on, so long 
as you have a 'nice man' at the head of the 
ticket. They'll vote it straight. Don't w^orry about 
that." It was all "practical" politics, but it 
rather soiled my new hope in the people's party. 
I began to see that the politicians with whom I 
was working were not so unlike the ones with 
whom I had fought. 

What seemed to puzzle them all was the fact 
that I showed no ambition to be nominated for 



THE BEAST IN THE DEMOCRACY 59 

any office. They could not understand what I 
was working for; and I did not tell them. I 
had worked hard. During the primary contest 
I did not go home for two weeks, but lived with 
Speer at a hotel and helped him with those meas- 
ures of offence and defence that make up the 
incidents of a factional quarrel. At the local 
convention in the Opera House, there had almost 
been a riot; revolvers had been drawn, and we 
had had to hold our meeting with our lives in 
our hands. All this had made my companions 
very friendly toward me — as such dangers do — 
and they told me that I was foolish not to look 
for something from the party in return for the 
work I had done. They suggested, among other 
things, that I might become a candidate for the 
office of District Attorney. 

Here was a suggestion that was more than 
interesting to me. I still had the amateur reform- 
er's idea that the corruption to which I w^as opposed 
could be checked and punished if the public 
guardians of the law would only do their 
duty; and it seemed to me that the District 
Attorney was one of the most powerful of those 
officials. I saw myself administering the office 
of public prosecutor with a heavy hand, and the 
prospect gave me a secret joy that made me 
chuckle. I sounded Boss Speer about the nom- 
ination; he said that Governor Thomas had 
already promised the place to Harry A. Lindsley, 



60 THE BEAST 

a young politician, whose name on the ticket 
— it was freely said — would ensure a large 
campaign contribution from one of the Denver 
public utility corporations. I, of course, had no 
such support to offer, and the party needed funds. 
I said no more about the matter. 

But I had already spoken of it to Gardener 
— with whom I was still in nominal partnership — 
and he had jumped at the idea with an eager- 
ness that was afterward to be explained to me. 
When I told him what Speer had said, he advised 
me to disregard it. "Make a fight," he coun- 
selled. "I'll help. The thing isn't settled yet. 
It can't be. I'll help." 

I have spoken in a previous chapter of Ed. 
Chase, the gambler, and of his offer to pay 
Gardener's first election expenses. He was 
reputed to be a millionaire, and he lived then — 
as he does now — in considerable luxury on 
Capitol Hill, and associated with the most repu- 
table business men of the community. He was 
greatly respected in various quarters, and he had 
all sorts of good qualities, no doubt; but he made 
his money out of numerous gambling hells and 
policy joints which he had conducted for years 
in Denver under both political parties; and it 
was understood that he was one of the three 
men who afterward formed the gambling "trust" 
of Denver. He was also a stockholder in sev- 
eral utility corporations, and his influence in 



THE BEAST IN THE DEMOCRACY 61 

politics was well known. There was a law 
against gambling, of course, and it was spas- 
modically enforced when public clamour com- 
pelled a pretence, at least, of prosecution; but 
for the most part the gambling was "let alone" 
with the approval of those business men who 
believe that this sort of vice helps business by 
keeping a "wide-open" and attractive town. 
(They once got up a petition in favour of open 
public gambling in Denver, on that argument.) 

One of Gardener's first moves, in his little 
campaign to procure me the nomination, was to 
bring Chase to our office and usher me in to see 
him. The visit was contrived in a way to make 
it se/em accidental — and perhaps it was acci- 
dental. At any rate, it was carried off in that 
jocular and "joshing" tone of serious banter in 
which a man who is suspected of being squeamish 
is introduced to a proposal that needs a disguise. 

Chase was an elderly man, with gray hair and 
moustache. He would pass anywhere as a nice, 
clean "office man," careful of his health and his 
appearance — as the prosperous owner of a suc- 
cessful drygoods shop, w^ho was a deacon of his 
church. He said little. Gardener did the talking. 

I knew that Chase was a friend of Boss Speer, 
a contributor to our campaign fund and a man, 
therefore, who would have something to say 
about the candidates who were to be nomi- 
nated on our ticket. Gardener explained that on 



62 THE BEAST 

account of a crusade which the "reformers" had 
been making against gambling. Chase was par- 
ticularly interested in the District Attorne s 
office. And Gardener, as being friendly to both 
a prospective District Attorney and to the man 
whom that official would, perhaps, have to pros- 
ecute, went on to explain — smiling from one 
to the other — that Chase did not expect 
escape prosecution, that he understood his men 
would be hauled into court occasionally and 
fined the limit, and that he would not embarrass 
me by resenting any such grand-stand plays. 

% Y ; -in ~ . B : ." Gardener said, "Mr. Chase 
doesn't want anything but what's fair. He 
doesn't expect to run wide open all the time. 
Whenever the District Attorney has to make a 
demonstration, he's willing to pay up. That's 
understood. You needn't feel worried about that. 
Need he?" 

Chase, it seemed to me, was a little embar- 
rassed. He stroked his moustache, rubbed his 
chin, nodded when he was appealed to, and 
relieved his gravity with a half-reluctant smile. 
I listened, and kept my thoughts to myself. 

"They don't want you to do anything crooked, 
Ben," Gardener laughed. "All they want is fair 
play. You know gambling can't be stopped is 
long as men want to gamble. You can handle the 
thing in a practical way. They'll be reasonable. 
You needn't be afraid of offending your friends." 



THE BEAST IN THE DEMOCRACY 63 

I replied, at last, that my nomination was not 
settled upon, at all — that I had not even made 
up my own mind about it yet. And I backed out 
of the interview, at the first opportunity, as unos- 
tentatiously as I could. 

I understood that Gardener, being now very 
intimate with Chase, wished to get him to throw 
his influence for my nomination. A few min- 
utes later, I understood why he was so eager. 
When Chase had gone, Gardener came to my 
room in the office, in high feather. Why! with 
me as District Attorney and himself as counsel for 
the gamblers, we could make $25,000 a year 
outside my salary — without the slightest danger 
of becoming "involved" — and at the same time 
gain all the credit from the community of enforc- 
ing the law and prosecuting the gamblers. No 
doubt of it. The game had been played in this 
way, in Denver, before. 

I understood the uselessness of arguing with 
these men. If I replied that I was not in politics 
"for my pocket" and wished to do what was 
"straight," they would only give me credit for 
being either less honest than they were — since 
I added hypocrisy to guilt — or of being an 
impractical "goody-goody" who had no busi- 
ness in politics. I had learned, too* the value of 
keeping my own counsel, if I was to get any 
of the reforms I wished from the very "prac- 
tical" men whom conditions had put in power. 



64 THE BEAST 

So I simply told Gardener that I was not Dis- 
trict Attorney, and had no prospect of being. I 
got away from him — feeling rather sick at heart 
— and dismissed the matter from my mind, 
with relief. "I didn't understand you, Ben," 
he told me long after. "And I don't believe 
you understood yourself." Perhaps not. I was 
not trying to understand myself. I was trying 
to find my way through the jungle into which I 
had walked so gaily. 

One thing was certain: I could net maintain 
even a nominal partnership with Gardener any 
longer. I should either have to start out in law 
for myself or take a political office. Boss Speer, 
when next I met him, said: "Ben, you've got 
some strong backing for District Attorney. Chase 
has been up to see me. He says he's for you!" 
I accepted the honour of his support — resolved 
that if I ever got the office I should play the 
deuce with some of the gentlemen who had put 
me in it — but I imagine, from what I have 
learned since, that all this "strong backing" 
came from Gardener. Governor Thomas, shortly 
after, assured me that the nomination had been 
irrevocably promised to Harry A. Lindsley (who 
was elected), and I let the matter drop. Gar- 
dener said to me, years later, when he had become 
leading counsel for the head of the gamblers' 
syndicate: "Chase was saying, only the other 
day, what a narrow escape we had when we 



THE BEAST IN THE DEMOCRACY 65 

picked you for District Attorney. He said you'd 
have raised hell with us, sure/' And I realize 
now that I should never have been seriously con- 
sidered f d£ the place if it had not been for Gardener. 

Boss Spee£ was very apologetic about the way 
in which I had been "turned down/ 5 and he 
offered me a place as a District Judge. My 
name was even put on the "slate" that was made 
up at the caucus. But it was afterward explained 
to me that the Denver City Tramway Company 
and the Denver Union Water Company favoured 
Peter L. Palmer as a candidate for judge, and 
backed him with the promise of a large campaign 
contribution; and I was dropped again "for the 
good of the party." On the ticket that passed 
the convention my name did not appear at all. 

This fact — to the evident surprise of all con- 
cerned — did not prevent me from going into 
the election with as much enthusiasm as ever. I 
still had hope that if I maintained my influ- 
ence in the party, I might use the gratitude of 
my party friends to slip some of my reform meas- 
ures through the Legislature. I became a mem- 
ber of the Democratic State Executive Commit- 
tee and had an opportunity of learning how 
amazingly high were the legitimate expenses of 
a campaign. The cost of maintaining watchers 
and workers at the polls and of paying for car- 
riages and automobiles to bring in voters was 
incredible; I know that in later campaigns it 



66 THE BEAST 

amounted to $25,000 for the city alone; and this 
item of cost formed only a small portion of the 
whole expense, even in the city. I helped to 
select the members of our finance committee, 
who had to raise the funds for the campaign; and 
I learned that these men were selected because 
of their connection with wealthy corporations. 
Our chairman, Milton Smith, for example, was 
attorney for the telephone company and — at 
times — for the gas company, the brewers, the 
gamblers and all the rest of that ring. Several 
other members of the committee were similarly 
connected. But then, it was pointed out, the 
director and chief organizer of the Republican 
campaign, was ''Big Steve"! 

There was much voluble concern as to which 
campaign committee would get the largest con- 
tributions; and it began to dawn upon me that 
instead of being a contest of parties, the election 
was going to be a contest of corporations, through 
their paid agents, for the control of the machin- 
ery of government. The "workers'' in the ranks 
of the fight were working for nothing, apparently, 
but the promise of this or that picayune "job" 
under the politicians. The politicians were strug- 
gling for nothing, apparently, but the offices and 
the graft to which they hoped to be elected. The 
corporations, over them all, were apparently using 
them all to keep themselves above the laws by 
owning the sources and the agents of the law. 



THE BEAST IN THE DEMOCRACY 67 

And the people ? The " dear people " ? In none of 
the private conversations or secret caucuses 
of the politicians, do I remember hearing the 
people mentioned except in the way that the 
directors of a "wildcat" mining company might 
speak of the prospective shareholders whom they 
had yet to induce to buy stock. 

That, at least, was the situation as I look back 
upon it now — as a man having struggled through 
a bit of tangled underwood, looks back upon it 
from a clearing on a rise of ground. At the time 
I could not see the forest for the trees. I saw 
nothing, in the days preceding the election, but 
the struggles of one or another organization to 
obtain some partisan advantage by getting this 
or that party judge and his court to give them 
an unfair ballot, to complicate it by putting up 
"tickets" with misleading designations, and to 
confuse the unfriendly voter in some way or other 
for the party's benefit. I saw the judges on the 
bench called into political conferences, in private 
rooms, to decide these cases in advance. And 
when I spoke to an old-timer about it, he said: 
"Don't be too squeamish, young man. This 
is the way the game is played." 

At first it seemed that our party would win 
both state and county elections. But as the day 
approached we heard that one band of corpora- 
tions — led by the local gas company with its 
Wall Street affiliations — was determined that 



68 THE BEAST 

the Republicans should carry the county. Money 
began to flow victoriously from the Republican 
headquarters. Our finance committeemen began 
to wail that some of the corporations that had 
promised contributions now refused them. It 
was as if an army had been deserted, not by its 
leaders, but by the very government that supplied 
its pay chest! The United States Marshal, being 
a Republican official, began to swear in a little 
army of deputy marshals, composed of all sorts 
of thugs and Negro rowdies, to do "police duty" 
at the polls. The Fire and Police Board, being 
Democratic, swore in special policemen to oppose 
them; but, on account of the deficit in the pay- 
roll, the Board could not compete on equal terms 
with the Marshal. Then the Democratic organ- 
ization appealed to the courts, and the Marshal 
was enjoined by law from interfering with the 
election. But the Republicans still had the 
money. They went to the Democratic Sheriff of 
the county and bought his office for three days 
for $20,000 — according to the confession after- 
ward made — and swore in their outlawed 
deputy marshals as deputy sheriffs. Thus the 
Democrats — or rather, the corporations behind 
them — had the police and the city jail to aid 
them at the polls ; and the Republicans — or 
the corporations whom they represented — had 
the Sheriff and the county jail. And the stage 
was set for riot and murder. 



THE BEAST IN THE DEMOCRACY 69 

Riot and murder came, with the opening of 
the polls. I had been at work all night — in 
charge of Democratic headquarters during the 
illness of our chairman — and I had lain down 
in my clothes, exhausted, toward daybreak. I 
was awakened to receive a telephone report, 
from one of our watchers, that there was going 
to be "hell to pay at Twenty-second and Larimer." 
"These cursed nigger deputy sheriffs," he said, 
"are butting in here. Our men won't stand for it. 
It means a shooting. Some one had better hustle 
down from headquarters and try to settle it." 

I hurried downstairs (our headquarters were in 
the Brown Palace Hotel), called a cab, and 
ordered the driver to get me to Twenty-second 
and Larimer as quickly as he could. The streets 
were quiet and empty in the dingy light of a cold 
November morning, and we clattered down Eigh- 
teenth Street at a noisy gallop. We swung into 
Larimer Street, in front of the Windsor Hotel — 
the very hotel that at my first arrival in Denver 
had seemed so high and so magnificent ! — and 
we had little more than passed it when the driver 
pulled up with a suddenness that almost shot 
me from my seat. I flung open the cab door 
and thrust out my head to see what was the mat- 
ter. The street was full of excited people who 
seemed to be scurrying this way and that; and 
over their heads there hung a thin cloud of smoke, 
very still in the dead air. As I jumped out and 



70 THE BEAST 

ran toward the polling place, I saw a policeman 
lying behind a telegraph pole, in a quivering 
huddle, writhing painfully; a Negro sprawled in 
blood in the gutter; a little knot of men woe 
supporting a wounded man to a drugstore; the 
gongs of ambulance and patrol wagons sounded 
their warnings from a distance; and while men 
came running up, as I ran, to see what had hap- 
pened, others quietly made off down the street. 

I went over to the Negro. The murder that 
had been bought and paid for, lay at my feet. 
His mute eyes were wide open: a puzzled frown 
puckered his black forehead that was wrinkled 
like an ape's. He lay there — the broken tool 
of those same criminals that had used the Clerk 
of the House whom I had seen bleeding in the 
Capitol — flung aside now in the gutter, dead, 
but with this sort of dumb question staring at me 
from his poor, bestial, bewildered face. 

The physical revulsion of the sight nauseated 
me. When a man touched me on the shoulder 
I started, with a shudder, as if I had been the 
author of that horror myself. 

"They began it," he said. 

They had, indeed, begun it, as I found out 
when I followed the police and their prisoners 
to the City Hall station, and got a confession 
from the Negroes there. And in my indignation 
against the Republican machine. I accused the 
Republicans to the reporters, and gloated over 



THE BEAST IN THE DEMOCRACY 71 

the flaring headlines of the "extras" that fixed 
the guilt of the crime on the Republicans who 
had sent those irresponsible Negroes to the polls 
with firearms to "make trouble." But had they 
begun it? Or had it been begun by the men 
who gave the money to hire them — the heads of 
the warring corporations who were determined 
to win that election at the muzzle of the revolver, 
if need be, so that they might be the owners of the 
hung juries, the paid speakers, the venal clerks, 
the unjust judges, the free gamblers and all the 
vice and graft that should keep them in power? 
Yes! The men who had ruined young Gardener 
had shed that blood. The question on the dead 
face of that miserable creature in the gutter was 
theirs to answer. And some day, somewhere, 
somehow, they shall answer — let us hope. 

That was my experience in the election of 1900. 
Those were the lessons I learned from it. Those 
and one other — of another import — which I have 
left till the last because it was a lesson of hope, 
and because, in spite of all, it seems to me there 
is still ground for hope. 

This was it: 

Toward the close of September, in the cam- 
paign, Theodore Roosevelt, then Governor of 
New York, came to Denver, and he was challenged 
by Governor Thomas to defend the position of 
the Republican party upon certain issues of the 
contest. Colorado was a free-silver state, almost 



72 THE BEAST 

unanimously, and the game was to make Roose- 
velt either embarrass his party or himself by forc- 
ing him to handle the free-silver question before 
an audience that would resent the opinions of 
an Eastern "gold-bug" however mildly he might 
put them. 

The Opera House was packed with people. 
Senator Lodge, of Massachusetts, held their atten- 
tion for a time, but they were impatient to hear 
" Teddy." He was late. He had not arrived 
yet. Expectation became noisy, restless, inimical. 
Presently we heard the low grumble of a crowd 
shouting in the street. The word was cried about 
that he was coming. And almost immediately, 
in a crash of music from the band, he strode down 
to the footlights and faced the shouting audience. 

He looked tired. But without waiting for 
silence, with his head down as if he were about 
to charge, he bared his teeth and uttered some- 
thing; unintelligible, in a hoarse voice. The audi- 
ence roared. He took a long breath, watching 
them, dogged, determined, filling his lungs; and 
then — with a sudden gesture that compelled 
silence — he screamed at them, with all his teeth 
showing: " We — stand — on a — gold — platform!" 

It came to them like a blow in the face; and 
before they could take voice, he added, pound- 
ing out the words with his fist: "We stand for 
the same thing in Colorado that we stand for in 
New York!" 



THE BEAST IN THE DEMOCRACY 73 

He got no further. The shout of applause that 
followed came in a roar of delight from a thou- 
sand throats. They cheered him as if he had 
said the one thing they had been waiting to hear, 
instead of the very thing that no Republican 
politician in Denver would have dared to whisper 
to any single one of them, in the dark, behind 
a locked door. They cheered him as if they 
would split their throats. A startled Demo- 
cratic politician who stood near me cried: " Great 

G ! He hasn't converted this crowd to the 

gold standard, has he?" (The wisdom of poli- 
ticians!) They cheered his courage, his truth, 
his defiance of political hedging, his honesty, his 
manliness. It was the cheer of pride, of love, 
of admiration. It was the voice of our people 
raised to greet those very qualities in a politician 
which the Beast has tried to crush. It was, to 
me, the voice of hope. 

I went home, that night, resolved never to for- 
get the lesson. Often since, when I have faced 
the hoot of prejudiced opposition from my own 
small stage in public life, I have remembered 
Roosevelt, and filled my lungs again, and cleared 
my throat for another defiance. For I believe, 
in that way, with our people, there is hope. 



CHAPTER V 

THE BEAST IN THE COUNTY COURT 

WELL, the Democrats carried the county 
and the state in November, 1900, and 
our "people's party" was put in power; but I no 
longer had any of the illusions with which I had 
volunteered in the battle. I had found that 
most of my companions in the struggle were not 
patriots but hired mercenaries, fighting — as our 
opponents fought — under the black flag of cor- 
poration pirates. I had as much hope of get- 
ting my reform laws passed by the machine "bosses " 
as a man might have of getting a city charter for 
a South American town from a party of buccan- 
eers who had taken the place for pillage. I had 
drawn up our threatened constitutional amend- 
ment for Gardener, but I knew he would never 
fight for it ; and, of course, he never did. I was at 
a standstill, helpless, and not merely discouraged 
but convinced that there was nothing I could do. 
While I was in this state of mind, I was offered, 
as a "political reward," the office of Judge of the 
County Court, to succeed Judge R. W. Steele, 
who had been elected to the Supreme Court and 
had left the county bench empty. Under the 

74 



THE BEAST IN THE COUNTY COURT 75 

law, the Board of County Commissioners had 
power to appoint his successor for his unexpired 
term of nine months. Judge Steele had been 
one of the heads of the law firm for which I had 
worked so long as office boy and clerk; and he 
wished me to succeed him in the county court. 
The members of the Democratic Executive Com- 
mittee signed a petition endorsing me for the 
place. Senator Patterson, with whom I had been 
associated as counsel in the famous "Tritch Will 
Case/' went before the commissioners without 
my knowledge and argued my claims. (It has 
been said that I got Senator Patterson's support 
as the result of a political "deal," and any one 
who believes that story is welcome to his credu- 
lity. I shall here content myself with deny- 
ing it flatly. I have disproved it often enough 
on the platform.) As a result of this political 
and personal influence on my behalf, the Com- 
missioners appointed me in December, 1900, and 
I took office in January, 1901. 

The Court House of Denver is the usual old 
stone building, smutted with smoke,* standing in 
the centre of a city square, with lawns and stone 
walks and elm trees in which the city sparrows 
are always noisy. On its front law T n, in the usual 
decorative fountains, some bronze-coated nymphs 
and cherubs disport themselves all winter in the 
memories of a discontinued shower-bath. On 

*It has been "sandblasted" since this was written. 



76 THE BEAST 

the pinnacle of the building's dome there stands 
the inevitable emblematical figure of Justice, but 
it has been twice struck by lightning — equally 
emblematically, no doubt ! — so that Justice has 
lost not only her scales but the arm that upheld 
them. Here, in the usual dingy court room, with 
the usual drone of court officials and the usual 
forensic eloquence of counsel addressing the usual 
yawns of bored juries, the county court was held. 
It was then — as it is, now — - the busiest court 
in the state. It had jurisdiction to try election 
contests and such political lawsuits; it had a 
varied and general jurisdiction in civil cases in 
which property to the value of not more than 
$2,000 was involved — for which reason it was 
called "the poor man's" and "the people's" 
court; it was the court of appeal from police 
magistrates and justices of the peace; it had 
criminal jurisdiction in all "misdemeanours" and 
in "felonies" where the accused was under twenty- 
one years of age; and in addition, it was the pro- 
bate court for the city and the county. I was 
just thirty years of age when I took charge of it. 

I knew that Judge Steele, whom I succeeded, 
was an upright and just judge, on whom no party 
and no corporation had had any "strings." And 
in taking his place on the bench, I saw myself ris- 
ing above all the political sculduggery through 
which I had been struggling so long — to look 
down on it un tempted, with a judge's honour 



THE BEAST IN THE COUNTY COURT 77 

unbesmirched and a mind free to administer jus- 
tice with clean hands. I forgot that I had been 
given the place as a "political reward." 

I was immediately reminded of it by the expec- 
tations of those political "workers" whom the 
Board of County Commissioners wished me to 
appoint to offices in my court. They expected to 
succeed skilled clerks who had been in the ser- 
vice of the court for ten and. fifteen years, and 
they had no qualifications for the places they 
wished to fill. They assured me that "the Repub- 
licans did it," that my party required it of me, 
and that if I looked to any future in the party I 
must be loyal now. When I refused to make a 
single clerk "walk the plank," their indignation 
was amazing. My friends the "leaders" assured 
me that I need not expect a renomination to the 
bench; and the workers assured me that if I ever 
got a renomination they would "knife" me at the 
polls. When I pointed out that the court had to 
be run efficiently, in the interests of the people, 
they replied: "You'll find out, at the next con- 
vention, how much the people care." 

Then Mr. Fred. P. Watts, one of the County 
Commissioners who had voted me into office, 
came to me with a proposal that I should 
discharge my obligations to him by appointing 
him administrator of whatever estates might be 
involved before the Court; and when I refused 
this petition also, he promised me that he too 



78 THE BEAST 

would see that I had the proper reward for my 
ingratitude. (I had to appoint him, later, in one 
case, in which the litigants demanded it.) And 
finally, a lawyer-politician — an old friend whom 
I have not the heart to name — arrived with an 
incredible proposition that I should use my power 
as judge to have him appointed — wherever pos- 
sible — guardian, administrator or referee, as the 
case might require, in the suits that should come 
before me; and he in return would divide his fees 
with me! (He has been my consistent enemy in 
the legislature ever since my refusal to enter into 
that abominable conspiracy with him.) 

It was with a saddened pride, at last, that I took 
my place on the bench. I had dropped my part- 
nership with Senator Gardener. I had only nine 
months of office before me. And already my 
party had turned against me and my prospects of 
any future as a judge were as blank as despair. 

However, the mills of Justice began to grind; 
and I was there to see that everything in the hopper 
passed truly between the stones. Sitting behind 
a desk that looked as if it had been designed as a 
wooden sepulchre, I acted as public umpire in will 
cases that involved interminable petty family quar- 
rels, or in real-estate cases where one long file of 
witnesses swore to the falseness of the testimony 
of another file equally long, or in divorce pro- 
ceedings for non-support, tiresomely formal and 
undefended usually (probably because they had 



THE BEAST IN THE COUNTY COURT 79 

been prearranged), or in involved and technical 
disputes between landlords and tenants, debtors 
and creditors, purchasers and agents. Many of 
the trials were jury trials, and I was no more than 
a judicial automaton on a dais, obliged to give my 
decision according to the findings of the jury. 
Many of the cases involved property of so little 
value that it would not pay the fees of the empas- 
sioned lawyers employed to dispute its ownership; 
and these cases dragged along for days, till I felt 
like a man tied to a chair and compelled to listen 
forever to "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound 
and fury, signifying nothing." 

(I had often admired in some wise old judge 
the Olympian air of detachment with which he 
listened to the recital of the human tragedies that 
were arraigned before him, as if he w r ere above 
mortality and as indifferent as fate. I understood, 
now, that it was probably because he had begun 
young, as the judge of a county court, and been 
slowly bored to desiccation.) 

One winter afternoon, after I had been listen- 
ing for days to one of these cases — if I remem- 
ber rightly, it concerned the ownership of some 
musty old mortgaged furniture that had been 
stored in a warehouse and was claimed by the 
mortgagee on the mortgage and by the ware- 
houseman on a storage lien — the Assistant Dis- 
trict Attorney interrupted the proceedings to ask 
me if I would not dispose of a larceny case that 



80 THE BEAST 

would not take two minutes. I was willing. He 
brought in a boy, whom I shall call "Tony Cos- 
tello,"* and arraigned him before the court. The 
Clerk read the indictment; a railroad detective 
gave his testimony; the boy was accused of steal- 
ing coal from the tracks, and he had no defence. 
Frightened and silent, he stood looking from me 
to the jury, from the jury to the attorney, and from 
the attorney back to me — big-eyed and trembling 
— a helpless infant, trying to follow in our faces 
what was going on. The case was clear. There 
was nothing for me to do under the law but to 
find him guilty and sentence him to a term in the 
State Reform School. I did it — and prepared 
to go back to the affair of the second-hand fur- 
niture. 

There had been sitting at the back of the court- 
room an old woman with a shawl on her head, 
huddled up like a squaw, wooden-faced, and 
incredibly wrinkled. She waddled down the aisle 
toward the bench, while papers of commitment 
were being made out against the boy, and began 
to talk to the court interpreter in an excited gabble 
which I did not understand. I signed to the coun- 
sel for the warehouseman to proceed with his 
case ; he rose — and he was greeted with the most 
soul-piercing scream of agony that I ever heard 

♦This name, and those of all other children brought before the court, 
are disguised in order to protect the families from the consequences of 
publicity. 



THE BEAST IN THE COUNTY COURT 81 

from a human throat. The old woman stood 
there, clutching her shawl to her breast, her tooth- 
less mouth open, her face as contorted as if she 
were being torn limb from limb, shrieking hor- 
ribly. She threw her hands up to her head, 
grasped her poor, thin gray hair, and pulled it, 
yelling, with protruding eyes, like a madwoman. 
When the bailiff of the court caught hold of her to 
take her from the room, she broke away from him 
and ran to the wall and beat her head against it, 
as if she would batter the court house down on us 
all and bury our injustice under the ruins. They 
dragged her out into the hall, but through the closed 
door I could still hear her shrieking — shrieking 
terribly. I adjourned the court and retreated to 
my chambers, very much shaken and unnerved; 
but I still heard her, in the hall, wailing and sob- 
bing, and every now and then screaming as if her 
heart was being torn out of her. 

I did not know what to do. I thought I had 
no power, under the law, to do anything but what 
I had done. The boy was guilty. The law 
required that I should sentence him. The mother 
might scream herself dumb, but I was unable to 
help her. 

She continued to scream. Two reporters, 
attracted by the uproar, came to ask me if I could 
not do something for her. I telephoned the Dis- 
trict Attorney and asked him whether I could not 
change my order against the boy — make it a 



82 THE BEAST 

suspended sentence — and let me look into the 
case myself. He was doubtful — as I was — 
about my right to do such a thing, but I accepted 
the responsibility of the act and he consented to 
it. After w T hat seemed an hour to me — during 
which I could still hear the miserable woman wail- 
ing — the boy was returned to her and she was 
quieted. 

Then I took the first step toward the founding 
of the Juvenile Court of Denver. I got an offi- 
cer who knew Tony, and I went with him, at 
night, to the boy's home in the Italian quarter of 
North Denver. I need not describe the miser- 
able conditions in which I found the Costellos 
living — in two rooms, in a filthy shack, with the 
father sick in bed, and the whole family struggling 
against starvation. I talked with Tony, and 
found him not a criminal, not a bad boy, but 
merely a boy. He had seen that his father and 
his mother and the baby were suffering from cold, 
and he had brought home fuel from the railroad 
tracks to keep them warm. I gave him a little 
lecture on the necessity of obeying the laws, and 
put him "on probation." The mother kissed 
my hands. The neighbours came in to salute 
me and to rejoice with the Costellos. I left them. 
But I carried away with me what must have been 
something of their view T of my court and my 
absurd handling of their boy; and I began to 
think over this business of punishing infants 



THE BEAST IN THE COUNTY COURT 83 

as if they were adults and of maiming young lives 
by trying to make the gristle of their unformed 
characters carry the weight of our iron laws and 
heavy penalties. 

(Let me add, in parentheses, that I saw, too, 
in the Costello home, the trail of the Beast. 
The father was ill of lead-poisoning from work- 
ing twelve hours a day in a smelter. If society 
had done its duty by protecting him from the 
rapacity of his employer — by means of an 
eight-hour law and an employer's liability law 
— his son would not have been driven to steal.) 

Some days later, when I opened court in the 
morning, the Clerk told me we had a burglary 
case to try. I looked about for the burglars. 
Three small boys, all still in their teens, were 
arraigned before me, their little freckled faces 
swollen with tears. They had broken into a barn 
on Arapahoe Street and had stolen pigeons from a 
man named Fay. The name startled me. " Fay ?" 
I asked. He w r as pointed out to me in the court 
room. I knew him. It was the same man. 

It was the same man whose pigeons I had once 
started out to steal, with three other youngsters, 
years before, when I was no bigger than the 
smallest tow-head who stood whimpering before 
me. I had not had "sand enough' 5 to follow 
into the barn — it was the same barn — but at 
the time I had not thought that weakness to my 
credit, and neither had my companions. But 



84 THE BEAST 

"burglary" ? It had been mere mischief, an adven- 
ture, a boy's way of plagueing old Fay whom we 
considered the "grouchy" enemy of all boys. 

"I don't think these children should be charged 
with burglary," I said to the Clerk, rather shame- 
facedly. "Bring them into my chambers." 

They came, and I confronted in their small per- 
sons the innocent crimes of my own "kid" days. 
They told me all about their "burglary," their feud 
with Fay — whom two of the boys accused of 
having taken their pigeons — and their boyish in- 
dignation against him for having called in the cops 
in the quarrel . I lectured them — as self-righteously 
as I could under the circumstances — and discharged 
them on suspended sentence, with a warning. 

I went to the Clerk of the Court, Mr. Hubert 
L. Shattuck. "This is all wrong," I said. "It's 
all nonsense — bringing these children in here on 
criminal charges — to be punished — sentenced to 
prison — degraded for life!" 

"Well, Judge," he explained, "we sometimes 
get short on our fee accounts, and it helps to 
increase fees in this office to bring the kids here." 

It did. The officers of the court were paid so much 
for each conviction obtained by the court. They 
received no regular salaries. When they wished 
to make up arrears of pay, they rounded up a batch 
of youngsters and "put them through." The same 
thing was done in the police court, the court of the 
justice of the peace, and the criminal court. 



THE BEAST IN THE COUNTY COURT 85 

It was more than absurd, more than wrong. It 
was an outrage against childhood, against society, 
against justice, decency and common sense. I 
began to search the statutes for the laws in the 
matter, to frequent the jails in order to see how 
the children were treated there, to compile stat- 
istics of the cost to the county of these trials and 
the cost to society of this way of making criminals 
of little children. And the deeper I went into 
the matter, the more astounded I became. 

I found boys in the city jail, in cells reeking 
with filth and crawling with vermin, waiting trial 
for some such infantile offences as these I have 
described. I found boys in the county jail locked 
up with men of the vilest immorality, listening to 
obscene stories, subject to the most degrading 
personal indignities, and taking lessons in a high 
school of vice with all the receptive eagerness of 
innocence. I found that the older boys, now 
almost confirmed in viciousness, had begun their 
careers as Tony Costello had, or these burglars 
of the pigeon roost. And I found that many of 
the hardened criminals were merely the perfect 
graduates of the system of which I had been a sort 
of proud superintendent. 

It kept me awake at night. It possessed me 
with a remorseful horror. I went about talking, 
"agitating," investigating, pestering the jailers, 
spending my Sundays in the cells among the crim- 
inals, trying to draft reform laws and in every 



86 THE BEAST 

way making myself a nuisance to everybody. I 
put into this work all the balked enthusiasm that 
my unsuccessful legislative reforms had left me. 
I could help the children, if I could not help the 
"grown-ups." 

Some of these "grown-ups/ 5 whom my activi- 
ties annoyed, began to say I was "crazy." Our 
family physician came, on that report, to remon- 
strate with me. A relative, very much alarmed, 
asked me to be careful of myself, not to "overdo." 
And I felt as if I were standing before a burning 
building, with children crying for help in the 
flames at the upper windows, while my friends 
remonstrated: "Be calm. Don't excite yourself 
so. People will think you're not sane!" 

Not sane? Well it depends on what you con- 
sider "sane." One very sane thing to do would 
have been to turn my back on the fire and the 
children perishing in it, blame the inefficiency of 
the fire department, shrug a shoulder as if to say: 
"Well, it's none of my business," and go home 
to my dinner. I know that sort of sanity. I 
have seen it, many times, myself. But in the 
transports of my so-called insanity I found a sec- 
tion of the Colorado school law of April 12, 1899, 
by means of which I could get a ladder up to 
those doomed children. And this was it: 

"Section 4. Every child . . . who does 
not attend school ... or who is in attend- 
ance at any school and is vicious, incorrigible or 



THE BEAST IN THE COUNTY COURT 87 

immoral in conduct, or who is an habitual truant 
from school, or who habitually wanders about 
the streets during school hours without any law- 
ful occupation or employment, or who habitually 
wanders about the streets in the night time . . . 
shall be deemed a juvenile disorderly person and 
be subject to the provisions of this act." 

A juvenile disorderly person! Not a criminal 
to be punished under the criminal law, but a 
ward of the state, to be corrected by the state as 
parens patriae. The law was a school law, intended 
only for the disciplining of school children; but it 
could be construed as I proceeded to construe it. 
It was not a steel fire-escape built according to the 
statutory regulations. It was merely a wooden 
ladder rotting in a back yard. But it would reach 
the lower stories — and I asked the District Attor- 
ney in future to file all his complaints against chil- 
dren under this law, in my court, according to a 
form w T hich I furnished — and he agreed to do so. 
Thus our "juvenile court" was begun informally, 
anonymously, so to speak, but effectually. It was, 
as far as I knew, the first juvenile court in America 
and the simple beginning of a reform that has since 
gone round the world.* 

We had still to evolve some system of handling 
the children. We needed, above all, probation 
officers ; and — proceeding still under the school 

♦Chicago is technically entitled to the honour of having founded the first 
juvenile court so-called — under a law effective in June, 1899, two months 
after the approval of the law under which I worked, 



88 THE BEAST 

law — I went to all the school boards, asking for 
the appointment of truant officers whom I could 
use in the court. I addressed meetings of school- 
teachers, harangued women's clubs, Christian asso- 
ciations, charitable societies and church meetings, 
boring people with "the problem of the children" 
wherever I could get leave to speak. All this 
slowly aroused a public enthusiasm that was to 
become in time very powerful; it attracted atten- 
tion to the court and helped me with the parents 
of delinquent children. It brought in subscrip- 
tions from public-spirited men and women to help 
on the "good work." It prepared for the passage 
of the necessary laws which I was drafting for the 
next session of the Legislature. And it led me, 
finally, as you shall see, into another collision with 
the Beast. 

Meanwhile, however, a more imminent collision 
was impending. 

A reform movement had been started in Den- 
ver against the liquor "dives," or "wine rooms," 
as they were called. There was a law on the stat- 
ute books forbidding saloons to serve liquor to 
women, but a great part of the trade of the dives 
was done with prostitutes, and all the places were 
fitted up with "cribs" and "private rooms" where 
young girls could be drugged and ruined and the 
"white-slave" traffic promoted. The wine-room 
keepers were backed, of course, by the political 
power of the brewers, and the inmates were used 



THE BEAST IN THE COUNTY COURT 89 

by the System on election day as repeaters, ballot- 
box stuffers, and poll thugs, as they are in so many 
of our cities. So, when the reform movement 
against the "wine-room evil" became so danger- 
ously strong that the members of the Fire and 
Police Board saw that they would either have 
to enforce the law or involve the Democratic 
party in the danger of defeat, a dive keeper named 
Cronin was put forward in an appeal to the court 
for protection from the police. He was defended 
by Milton Smith, who was chairman of our Demo- 
cratic State Central Committee. From a prose- 
cution in a police magistrate's court, Cronin was 
brought before District Judge Peter L. Palmer, 
whose record needs no remark. And Judge Pal- 
mer promptly granted an injunction restraining 
the magistrate and the Fire and Police Board 
from prosecuting Cronin — grounding his decis- 
ion on the delicious argument that the "wine- 
room law" was an infringement of the constitu- 
tional rights of women. The ministers who cen- 
sured him were summoned before him and silenced 
with threats of fines for contempt of court. Cronin 
went back to his dive; the Fire and Police Board 
was rescued from an awkward position; and the 
wine rooms threw their doors wide open again to 
seduction. 

I was interested in the affair because I had seen 
how many of the young girls brought before me 
had been ruined in wine rooms. I had jurisdiction 



90 THE BEAST 

in the case because my court was the court of 
appeal from the magistrate's court in which the 
test proceedings against Cronin had been begun. 
And I went out of my way to bring some friendly 
pressure to bear on the Deputy City Attorney to 
get him to file an appeal in my court. 

He did it ; and before the case was called I was 
visited in my chambers by another member of our 
Democratic County Executive Committee, who 
was also an agent for the brewers' trust. He 
wished to speak to me about the Cronin matter. 
"You know, Judge," he said, "there's a liberal 
element in this town that controls about 10,000 
votes. If we offend them in this wine-room busi- 
ness, they'll hook up with the Republicans this 
fall, and we'll lose the elections. I know you're 
a good Democrat the same as I am, and I know 
you don't want to put the party in a hole. I'm 
interested in you. I want to see you succeed. I 
want to see you renominated and reelected, and 
I know you can't do it with this liberal element 
against you. Can you? Well, now, Judge Pal- 
mer has fixed this Cronin case all right. You can 
leave it with him, as it stands, and no one can 
say a word against you. It's up to him. If there's 
any kick from the church people, it's coming to 
him. Let him take it." And so on. It was the 
same ancient mixture of smiles and threats, of 
promised favours if I "played the game," and of 
political destruction prophesied if I refused. I 



THE BEAST IN THE COUNTY COURT 91 

was so used to the thing by this time that I was 
no longer even indignant at it. I thanked my 
honest friend for his disinterested solicitude about 
my political welfare, and got rid of him. 

The law in the Cronin case was clear. A com- 
munity, under its police powers, has the right, in 
the interests of "public health, public morals and 
public welfare/' to forbid women doing anything 
detrimental to those interests. The wine room 
was an exercise of the police power. I so held in 
my decision, and I was sustained by the Supreme 
Court of Colorado and again by the Supreme Court 
of the United States when the penniless Cronin, 
represented by Milton Smith, appealed to those 
courts. You may wonder where Cronin got the 
money to carry on such expensive litigation. You 
would have understood his status in the matter 
if you had seen the look of reproachful bewilder- 
ment that he turned on his counsel when he heard 
my decision. It was as if he said: "Why, I 
thought this was only a stall! Where's your pull 
with this court? What sort of mess are you 
fellows trying to get me into ?" 

That was in August, 1901, and the elections were 
to be held in November. "You're done," the 
politicians told me. "If you ever get a nomina- 
tion, you'll be scratched off the ticket by the lib- 
eral element. Sure as shooting!" 

I did not much care. I had had the satisfac- 
tion of getting one heavy whack in on the snout 



92 THE BEAST 

of the Beast, and I went back to my work for 
the children so as to establish at least a precedent 
of procedure for my successor to follow. But that 
work, and my decision in the Cronin case, had 
brought me to the notice of the "troublesome 
church element." It would have been poor poli- 
tics to stand against the sweep of the reform wave 
in an attempt to prevent my renomination. So I 
was allowed a place on the Democratic ticket 
again, and the System prepared quietly to "knife" 
me and elect my Republican opponent. 

At that time I was squeamish about judges 
"playing politics," and I decided that I should 
make no speeches and take no active part in the 
campaign. I had been assessed $1,000 by the 
finance committee as my contribution to the cam- 
paign fund, and an officer of the First National 
Bank of Denver (in which the court funds were 
deposited) offered to pay the assessment for me. 
I was no longer as innocent as I had been in the 
days of Gardener's first nomination, and I refused 
the offer and paid the money from my own purse. 
But it took all I had; I had nothing left even to 
pay for the printing of a circular letter to the elec- 
torate, and I allowed some lawyer friends to pay 
for that publication — a mistake which I have 
never made since. 

As election day approached it became appar- 
ent to every politician that I was hopelessly "out 
of the running." My Republican opponent was 



THE BEAST IN THE COUNTY COURT 93 

speaking every night — particularly from the bars 
of saloons — to enthusiastic audiences. I was 
posted in every "dive" in Denver as the one man 
on the Democratic ticket who was not "right." 
Sample ballots were put up, showing how to scratch 
me. The Democratic workers, to whom I had 
refused the spoils of office in the County Court, 
were openly working against me. It was cheer- 
fully predicted at Democratic headquarters that 
I could not possibly pull through, that I should 
run "away behind the ticket." After looking 
over the situation myself, I decided that I had 
not the shadow of a chance; and I went to bed 
early, on Election Night, without waiting to hear 
the returns. 

It was not until the following morning, when I 
came down to breakfast, that I learned, from the 
newspaper reports, what had happened. The 
lower wards had "knifed" me unmercifully; but 
in the upper districts, among the homes, unex- 
pected thousands had rallied to save the "kids 5 
court," and rebuke the "wine-room gang." Instead 
of running behind my ticket, I had run 2,000 votes 
ahead of it! 

When I saw those headlines, my heart leaped 
to a beat that almost suffocated me — not only 
because the result was so unforeseen — such an 
unheard-of thing for Denver — so startling a shock 
even to professional politicians, with the ear always 
to the ground — but because it was to me a warrant 



94 THE BEAST 

of renewed faith in the people, the first sign of an 
aroused public opinion on which I might rely, 
the resurrection call to all my dead hopes of 
reform. It was as if there had come — out of 
blind darkness — with the flash of a stroke of 
lightning — the full day ! The people were with 
me! (Even the Denver Republican, the paper 
that had opposed me, later conceded that "Lind- 
sey was honestly elected" — "one officer who did 
not owe his advancement to illegal votes" — 
endorsed by "honest Democratic and Republi- 
can voters alike!") I gulped my morning coffee 
as a boy gulps his emotion, with a pain in the 
throat. I had broken the System. I had sent 
the Beast to shelter, limping, with its tail between 
its legs. 

(Or rather, I thought I had.) As I walked 
down to my court that morning, the streets looked 
cleaner, the air seemed purer, life seemed more 
than ever good to live. My work was waiting 
for me, and thousands of good citizens were wait- 
ing to help me with it. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE BEAST AND THE CHILDREN 

MY WORK was certainly waiting for me. I 
had found our Colorado probate law in a 
muddle. The sections conflicted, and the con- 
flict led to litigation. The cost of administering 
the estates in the hands of the court was excessive, 
because the politicians had taken advantage of 
the conditions to create "jobs" for their hench- 
men. There was so much red tape that if we 
wished to sell "real estate" for a ward of the court 
it took us six months. In short, it was imperative 
that the law should be codified; and I organized 
a county judge's association and went to work 
on it. In the end, we not only simplified and 
harmonized the statutes, and protected the widows 
and orphans from legal exploitation, but saved 
estates in probate $50,000 a year by reducing the 
court rations of the political "workers." 

The fee system needed reformation, and we had 
to work on laws for that purpose, too ; but there 
is no space here to go into the details of our struggle 
with the politicians in the matter. We finally suc- 
ceeded only m getting a special law that forbade 
the collection of fees for prosecuting children. 

95 



66 THE BEAST 

Above all we needed "contributory juvenile 
delinquency" laws so that we might be able to 
prosecute parents for neglecting their children, 
and dive keepers, gamblers and such for tempting 
and seducing children; we needed laws establish- 
ing a juvenile court to which all children should 
be brought, instead of having them arraigned in 
the magistrate's court, the county court or the 
criminal court, haphazard; we had to obtain, for 
this juvenile court, probation officers with police 
powers so that we might arrest the wine-room 
keepers and such, whom the police, for political 
reasons, were protecting; we needed a detention 
school, so that children might no longer be put in 
jail; we had to strengthen the child-labour law 
and the compulsory school law; we needed trade 
schools, public playgrounds and public baths. 
But the Legislature was not to meet for twelve 
months, and I knew that before we could obtain 
any of these laws we must arouse a public demand 
for them. My work during 1902 was all schemed 
out to that end. And since the evils that we 
attacked are common to all our American cities, 
I wish to give the story of our fight in some detail. 

Those politicians in Denver who love darkness 
and gum shoes are never tired of screaming from 
their burrows that I am a "grand-stander." This 
is to them an epithet of opprobrium, you under- 
stand. They apply it to Roosevelt, La Follette, 
Folk, Jerome, Hughes and every other politician 



THE BEAST AND THE CHILDREN 97 

who has raised the window and shouted "Bur- 
glars!" when he heard the centre-bit in the night. 
It was in the year 1902 that I was first branded 
"a grand-stander." Ineffaceable stigma! I ap- 
pealed to the people to help me obtain laws for 
the people. I even did that! 

I appealed to them directly and indirectly, from 
the platform whenever I could get any of them 
before a platform, and through the newspapers 
whenever a reporter gave me an interview or an 
editor allowed me a column for an article. And 
pursuing the same policy I even used my place 
in the county court to arouse public opinion, and 
did it with a "sensational" denunciation that 
was flagrant "grand-standing" of the most delib- 
erate sort. 

It happened in this way : I found on my return 
to the bench that the law against the wine rooms 
was not being enforced. I found that the gambling 
hells were all open. I made the rounds of them 
at night, unrecognized, and saw boys in knicker- 
bockers at tables evidently reserved for their use. 
I saw indescribable things in the wine rooms and 
the dance halls connected with them, where young 
girls from laundries, factories, hotels and restaur- 
ants were being debauched. (For example, three 
girls who had been enticed into a saloon were 
discovered next day in the cellar of the building, 
by a woman passing on the street, who heard 
their groans; they were lying there stark naked, 



98 THE BEAST 

horribly ill and praying for death; and the police- 
man on the beat, when he was appealed to, refused 
to arrest the dive keeper.) 

Poor mothers appealed to my court to recover 
from the gamblers the money lost by their young 
sons. Employers prosecuted, before me, unfor- 
tunate boys who had stolen to make good their 
losses at the gaming tables. Even the newsboys 
were being encouraged to play "policy" with 
their pitiably small earnings. And when I pre- 
sented to the Assistant District Attorney the 
evidence against the gamblers taken publicly in 
my court, he confessed — confidentially — that 
his chief, District Attorney Lindsley, would not 
prosecute, because that was "the policy of the 
administration . ' ' 

I went to the District Attorney and demanded, 
"Why don't you arrest the dive keepers?" He 
replied that this was the duty of the police and 
that the Police Board refused to act. I wrote to 
the Chief of Police and he replied that he had 
given my letter to the president of the Board — 
Mr. Frank Adams. 

Mr. Frank Adams was not only president of 
the Police Board; he was president, also, of the 
ice trust that supplied brewers, saloon keepers 
and wine-room men with ice. He was a machine 
politician, with two brothers in the game; and 
he played the game "for all there was in it." 

My letter to the Chief brought Frank Adams 



THE BEAST AND THE CHILDREN 99 

to my chambers to see me, and I made a personal 
appeal to him, on behalf of the children, with my 
hand on his shoulder, looking him in the face. I 
told him of what I had seen, of how the young 
girls and boys were being sacrificed; and he 
promised, and repeated his promise, that he would 
see that the laws were enforced and the children 
protected. But he did not keep his word. I saw 
as much, with my own eyes, in a personal investi- 
gation; and the officers of my court confirmed it. 
I sent for the Chief of Police, showed him affidavits 
furnished by Mr. E. K. Whitehead, the secretary 
of the Humane Society, exposing the conditions, 
and accused the Police Board and himself of 
bad faith. 

He replied: "You're right. Things are just 
as you say, but I'm not going to be held respon- 
sible any longer. It's the policy of the adminis- 
tration. They think they need the support of 
these people to carry the next elections. Your 
kick must be against the Board and not against 
me." 

This was corroborated by what I had heard 
from a dive keeper whom I had sentenced in my 
court. "Judge," he had said, "I don't blame 
you, but I do blame that Police Board. Their 
man came to me collecting for the chairman of 
the party committee, and I put up $500, on the 
promise that the police wouldn't interfere with 
my saloon. Now he says you're kicking up a fuss 



100 THE BEAST 

and he can't protect me here." It was corrob- 
orated later by Frank Adams himself, when he 
tried to persuade me not to interfere judicially 
with the Police Board's right to appoint licence 
inspectors, because, he said, "We've got to keep 
these dive keepers in line." It was the System 
again; the System was making money from the 
debauching of young girls, and the Police Board 
was acting as toll keeper on this public road to 
prostitution. 

I wrote a note to the members of the Board 
inviting them to my court one Saturday morning, 
in May, got the newspaper reporters to come, and 
then took my place on the bench and publicly 
accused the astonished commissioners of neglect- 
ing their duties, of knowingly permitting the dives 
to ruin children, and of being personally respon- 
sible for much of the appalling immorality that 
came before my court. 

I addressed myself to them, but it was to the 
public ear that I was speaking. I described the 
cases that had come under my own eyes and 
named the dives in which they had originated. 
For the public ear again, I threatened that if the 
Board did not stop this traffic in the debauchery 
of little children, I should find means of obtain- 
ing power whereby our court could stop it. In 
short, I " grand-standed" — with a megaphone. 

The newspapers were the megaphone. They 
printed, on the front pages, "scare-head" accounts 



THE BEAST AND THE CHILDREN 101 

of that scene in the court room, with portraits of 
the police commissioners and cartoons of them 
"sweating' 5 under the denunciations of the court. 
The ministers took up the shout and repeated 
from their pulpits the facts I had given and the 
charges I had made. There was no withstand- 
ing the storm. The worst of the dives put up 
their shutters forthwith, and before they dared 
open again we had obtained from the Legislature 
the "contributory delinquency 55 laws and the 
police powers for probation officers that put the 
protection of the children in our hands. The 
System still has in Denver its tollgates for the 
men and women who go "the primrose path to 
the everlasting bonfire, 55 but at least it no longer 
levies on the helpless boys and girls whom it once 
dragged forcibly to physical and moral ruin. 

Meanwhile, we had been carrying on, also, our 
campaign against the jail, with the ultimate pur- 
pose of obtaining a detention home-school for 
children. I had found conditions in the jails 
almost as bad as they were in the dives. Boys 
repeated to me the obscene stories they had heard 
there, from the older prisoners, and described 
the abominable pollutions that had been com- 
mitted j3n their little bodies. I learned from a 
boy sixteen years old, a confirmed criminal, that 
he had been first imprisoned when he was ten and 
that he had learned in jail how to crack safes and 
had practised that art successfully when he was 



102 THE BEAST 

fifteen; he told of it with pride, and with an 
admiration of the man who had taught him. He 
said it was his ambition now to kill a policeman 
whom he hated, and he had taken as his model 
in life a young outlaw named Harry Tracy whose 
exploits had been reported in the newspapers. I 
found that the boys were guilty of indecent prac- 
tices among themselves and that, being confined 
in the matron's quarters, they had broken off the 
plaster of the wall that separated them from the 
women's room; and the girls there — it is unmen- 
tionable. Schoolboys they were. And when 
they were released, they went back to school, 
with the evil lessons they had learned, and taught 
them to their companions, spreading the plague, 
and infecting hundreds of young lives with the 
deadly virus of a physical vice. 

In addition to all this I found that some of the 
police were guilty of cruelties to the boys, used 
language to them that is unreportable, and uncon- 
sciously taught the boys to hate the law and look 
upon us all as their enemies. Several boys com- 
plained to me that they had been beaten by the 
jailer, and I found on investigation that they had; 
the welts and bruises on their bodies showed it; 
and prisoners who had seen them beaten testified 
to it. One morning a boy, released from jail 
where he had been locked up on a suspicion that 
proved false, came running into my chambers in 
hysterics, with the most awful look of horror on 



THE BEAST AND THE CHILDREN 103 

his face, and poured out to me with sobs and 
frightened shudder ings, the story of how the police 
had cursed and abused him, and of how the 
vagrants and criminals in the "bull pen/' where 
he had been thrown, had spat upon him and 
maltreated him. I kept going to the Chief of 
Police with these complaints, and to Frank Adams, 
the president of the Police Board. And they kept 
replying that the boys were lying to me, and that 
I was "going batty" on the "kid question" and 
encouraging the "little devils" to resist the police. 
Things went on in this way until our juvenile 
bills came before the Legislature, and then the 
opposition of the Police Board and the System 
came to a head under Senator "Billy" Adams, 
a brother of Frank Adams, the president of the 
Police Board. Nothing was done openly. The 
Board, of course, objected to allowing our pro- 
bation officers police powers, chiefly because we 
could then prevent the wine-room keepers from 
getting "protection" and paying for it; but such 
a reason for opposition could not be acknowl- 
edged. Instead, the bills were fought secretly 
in the committees and kept from a vote in the 
House by means of the same jugglery on the 
calendar that I had seen used before, on our 
"three-fourths jury" bill. After consulting with a 
friendly newspaper reporter named Harry Wilbur, 
of the Rocky Mountain News, I decided to " grand- 
stand" again. Wilbur had been a police court 



104 THE BEAST 

reporter and knew conditions in the jails. I gave 
him an interview in which I described some of 
the cases I had seen and investigated, and I gave 
him a free hand to add any other "horrible an' 
revoltin' details" that he knew to be true. 

The result was an article that took even my 
breath away when I read it next day on the front 
page of the newspaper. It was the talk of the 
town. It was certainly the talk of the Police 
Board; and Mr. Frank Adams talked to the 
reporters in a high voice, indiscreetly. He de- 
clared that the boys were liars, that I was " crazy," 
and that conditions in the jails were as good as 
they could be. This reply was exactly what we 
wished. I demanded an investigation. The 
Board professed to be willing, but set no date. 
We promptly set one for them — the following 
Thursday at two o'clock in my chambers at the 
Court House — and I invited to the hearing 
Governor Peabody, Mayor Wright, fifteen promi- 
nent ministers in the city, the Police Board and 
some members of the City Council. 

On Thursday morning — to my horror — I 
learned from a friendly Deputy Sheriff that the 
subpoenas I had ordered sent to a number of 
boys whom I knew as jail victims had not been 
served. I had no witnesses. And in three hours 
the hearing was to begin. I appealed to the 
Deputy Sheriff to help me. He admitted that 
he could not get the boys in less than two days. 



THE BEAST AND THE CHILDREN 105 

"Well then," I said, "for heaven's sake, get me 
Mickey." 

And Mickey? Well, Mickey was known to 
fame as "the worst kid in town." As such, his 
portrait had been printed in the newspapers — 
posed with his shine-box over his shoulder, a 
cigarette in the corner of his grin, his thumbs 
under his suspenders at the shoulders, his feet 
crossed in an attitude of nonchalant youthful 
deviltry. He had been brought before me more 
than once on charges of truancy, and I had been 
using him in an attempt to organize a newsboys' 
association under the supervision of the court. 
Moreover, he had been one of the boys who had 
been beaten by the jailer, and I knew he would 
be grateful to me for defending him. 

It was midday before the Sheriff brought him 
to me. "Mickey," I said, "I'm in trouble, and 
you've got to help me out of it. You know I 
helped you." 

"Betcher life yuh did, Judge," he said. "I'm 
wit' yuh. W'at d' yuh want?" 

I told him what I wanted — every boy that 
he could get, who had been in jail. "And they've 
got to be in this room by two o'clock. Can you 
do it?" 

Mickey threw out his dirty little hand. "Sure 
I kin. Don't yuh worry, Judge. Get me a wheel 
— dhat's all." 

I hurried out with him and got him a bicycle, 



106 THE BEAST 

and he flew off down Sixteenth Street on it, his 
legs so short that his feet could only follow the 
pedals half way round. I went back to my 
chambers to wait. 

I trusted Mickey. He was the brightest street 
gamin that our court ever knew. Once we 
organized a baseball nine, with Mickey as cap- 
tain, in his quarter of the town where the Irish 
boys were continually at war in the streets with 
the Jewish children of the district. We gave them 
uniforms and bats and balls, on condition that 
they stop smoking cigarettes and fighting. His 
nine became the " champ ines" of the town among 
boys of their age; and one day in court I con- 
gratulated Mickey on his victories. "Aw well, 
Judge," he said, "yuh see it's dhis way: half o' 
dhese kids is Irish an' half o' dhem 's Jews. An* 
yuh know when dh' Irish an' dhe Jews get togedher 
dhey kin lick anyt'ing dhat comes down dhe 
pike!" "How can that be," I asked him, "when 
there are nine boys in a baseball team? There 
must be more of one than the other." "No, 
dhere ain't, neidher," he said. "Dhe pitcher's 
an Irish Jew an' dhe best kid in dhe bunch. 
Come here, Greeny." "Greeny" was a Green- 
stein and he was red-headed. If he was not an 
Irish Jew I don't know what he could have been! 

Anyway, I knew that if Mickey could not get 
the boys for me, no one could. I waited. As 
two o'clock approached, the ministers began to 



THE BEAST AND THE CHILDREN 107 

come into my room, one by one, and take seats 
in readiness. Mr. Wilson of the Police Board 
arrived to represent his fellow-commissioners. 
The Deputy District Attorney came, the president 
of the upper branch of the City Council came, 
Mayor Wright came, and even Governor Pea- 
body came — but no boys ! I felt like a man who 
had ordered a big dinner in a strange restaurant 
for a party of friends, and then found that he had 
not brought his purse. . . . I was just about 
to begin my apologies when I heard an excited 
patter of small feet on the stairs and the shuffle 
and crowding of Mickey's cohorts outside in the 
hall. I threw open the door. " I got 'em, Judge," 
Mickey cried. 

He had them — to the number of about twenty. 
I shook him by the shoulder, speechless with 
relief. "I tol' yuh we'd stan' by yuh, Judge," 
he grinned. 

He had the worst lot of little jailbirds that ever 
saw the inside of a county court, and he pointed 
out the gem of his collection proudly — "Skinny" 
a lad in his teens, who had been in jail twenty- 
two times! "All right, boys," I told them, "I 
don't know you all, but I'll take Mickey's word 
for you. You've all been in jail and you know 
what you do there — all the dirty things you hear 
and see and do yourselves. I want you to tell 
some gentlemen in here about it. Don't be 
scared. They're your friends the same as I am. 



108 THE BEAST 

The cops say you've been lying to me about the 
way things are down in the jails there, and I want 
you to tell the truth. Nothing but the truth, now. 
Mickey, you pick them out and send them in one 
by one — your best witnesses first." 

I went back to my chambers. " Gentlemen/' 
I said, "we're ready." 

I sat down at the big table with the Governor 
at my right, the Mayor at my left and the president 
of the Board of Supervisors and Police Com- 
missioner Wilson at either end of the table. The 
ministers seated themselves in the chairs about 
the room. (We allowed no newspaper reporters 
in, because I knew what sort of vile and unprint- 
able testimony was coming.) Mickey sent in his 
first witness. 

One by one, as the boys came, I impressed upon 
them the necessity of telling the truth, encouraged 
them to talk, and tried to put them at their ease. 
I started each by asking him how often he had 
been in jail, what he had seen there, and so 
forth. Then I sat back and let him tell his 
story. 

And the things they told would raise your hair. 
I saw the blushes rise to the foreheads of some 
of the ministers at the first details. As we went 
on, the perspiration stood on their faces. Some 
sat pale, staring appalled at these freckled young- 
sters from whose little lips, in a sort of infantile 
eagerness to tell all they knew, there came stories 



THE BEAST AND THE CHILDREN 109 

of bestiality that were the more horrible because 
they were so innocently, so boldly, given. It 
was enough to make a man weep; and indeed 
tears of compassionate shame came to the eyes of 
more than one father there, as he listened. One 
boy broke down and cried when he told of the 
vile indecencies that had been committed upon 
him by the older criminals ; and I saw the muscles 
working in the clenched jaws of some of our 
"investigating committee" — saw them swallow- 
ing the lump in the throat — saw them looking 
down at the floor blinkingly, afraid of losing 
their self-control. The Police Commissioner 
made the mistake of cross-examining the first 
boy, but the frank answers he got only exposed 
worse matters. The boys came and came, till 
at last, a Catholic priest, Father O'Ryan, cried 
out : ' ' My God ! I have had enough ! ' ' Governor 
Peabody said hoarsely: "I never knew there 
was such immorality in the world!' 9 Some one 
else put in, "It's awful — awful !" in a half 
groan. 

"Gentlemen/' I said, "there have been over 
two thousand Denver boys put through those 
jails and those conditions, in the last five years. 
Do you think it should go on any longer ?" 

Governor Peabody rose. "No," he said; "no. 
Never in my life have I heard of so much rot — 
corruption — vileness — as I've heard to-day from 
the mouths of these babies. I want to tell you 



110 THE BEAST 

that nothing I can do in my administration can 
be of more importance — nothing I can do will I 
do more gladly than sign those bills that Judge 
Lindsey is trying to get through the Legislature 
to do away with these terrible conditions. And 
if," he said, turning to the Police Commissioner, 
"Judge Lindsey is 'crazy,' I want my name 
written under his, among the crazy people. And 
if any one says these boys are 'liars,' that man is 
a liar himself!" 

Phew! The "committee of investigation" dis- 
solved, the boys trooped away noisily, and the 
ministers went back to their pulpits to voice the 
horror that had kept them silent in my small 
chamber of horrors for two hours. Their ser- 
mons went into the newspapers under large black 
headlines; and by the end of the next week our 
juvenile court bills were passed by the Legislature 
and made law in Colorado. 

While public indignation was still steaming 
we got a grant from the City Council for our 
Detention School, and then we followed up with 
a demand for public playgrounds and public 
baths. Neither came easily. It took us two 
years of almost continuous "agitation" in the 
newspapers, at council and committee meetings 
and from the public platform. We had to found 
a juvenile improvement association, collect sta- 
tistics pertinent to the matter, get estimates of 
the probable cost of the improvements and so 



THE BEAST AND THE CHILDREN 111 

forth. Mr. W. M. Downing, a member of the 
Park Board, finally carried the day with his asso- 
ciates and got a grant for the playgrounds, but 
the public bath was still lacking. For a time 
the Board of County Commissioners allowed us 
to fit up a sort of bathhouse for court children 
in the basement of the Court Building, but this 
aid was withdrawn when I antagonized the Board 
in another matter. Finally I turned the Court 
House fountains over to the street gamin — on 
condition that they wore swimming trunks — 
and protected them when they ran, dripping, into 
my court room from the pursuit of the indignant 
"cops." It seemed to me that if the citizens of 
Denver could afford a perpetual shower bath to 
a few bronze painted cherubs in a fountain, they 
could afford it to these more sensitive and grate- 
ful cherubs of flesh and blood, who were coated 
with dust and dirt. The council finally saw the 
matter from the same point of view, and the free 
baths were established. 

Do I boast ? By no means — although here is 
the only opportunity I shall have to boast through- 
out this story of the war with the Beast. I do 
not feel like boasting; for while w r e were winning 
in the fight for the children, I struck the trail of 
the Beast in a wholly unexpected quarter, fol- 
lowed it up blindly and stumbled into a struggle 
that showed me for the first time how the brute 
could defend itself. It had been merely dodging 



112 THE BEAST 

me and growling at me heretofore. Now it fell 
upon me tooth and claw; and the fact that I have 
any public life or reputation left to me at all is 
due to the lucky chance that is only short of being 
a miracle. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE BEAST, GRAFT AND BUSINESS 

ONE Saturday morning in the early part of 
May, 1902 — while we were still in the 
midst of our fight against the wine rooms and 
against the jail — I saw a package of ledger sheets 
lying on a chair in the office of Mr. Thos. L. 
Bonfils, who was then Clerk of my court, and 
on top of the package there was a bill. I picked 
it up, absent-mindedly. It was from the Smith- 
Brooks Printing Company, who held the county 
contract for such supplies. It read: "To 1,000 
sheets of paper, $280." 

Twenty-eight cents a sheet ! 

"What?" I asked the Clerk. "Are we paying 
twenty-eight cents a sheet for ledger paper?" 

He replied: "I don't know. The bills never 
come here. They go to the Commissioners. That 
one must have been left by mistake." 

"Well," I said, puzzled, "it seems funny! 
Twenty-eight cents a sheet. Go down to Smith- 
Brooks for me and ask if this bill's right." 

Court had adjourned. I went into my cham- 
bers and took up my work there — until the Clerk 
came back from Smith-Brooks with the explana- 

113 



114 . THE BEAST 

tion that the bill should have been delivered to the 
Clerk of the Board of County Commissioners. To 
my inquiry about the correctness of the price 
charged, they returned the courteous reply: 
"That's none of your business!" 

It seemed to me that since the bill was charged 
against our court, it was somewhat our business, 
and I felt a desire to know how many bills of 
this sort we were being charged with. I sent a 
highly disingenuous message to the Clerk of the 
County Board, telling him that I thought he was 
mixing up our accounts with those of some other 
court, and charging us with supplies that we 
had not received; and I asked him to send us 
our bills, to let us see them. At five o'clock 
that afternoon I received a large bundle of them. 
One hasty glance showed me what I had stumbled 
upon. 

Graft! Petty graft! And not so very petty, 
either. We were being charged $6 each for letter 
files that, I knew, were not worth more than forty 
cents. Letter paper furnished for my use was 
costing the county $36 a thousand sheets and I 
was sure that it was not worth more than $4 a 
thousand. On every item in those bills the county 
was being charged from ten to twenty times the 
ordinary market price of the goods. I could 
scarcely believe my eyes. I did not believe them 
until I had called into my chambers a wholesale 
printer whom I knew; and he confirmed my sus- 



THE BEAST, GRAFT AND BUSINESS 115 

picions, reluctantly, and only after I had prom- 
ised not to involve him in the affair. 

I was now convinced that the county was being 
robbed, but I was not convinced that the Com- 
missioners were aware of the robbery. So, that 
afternoon, I wrote a letter to the chairman of the 
Board asking him whether the Commissioners 
knew what was being paid for these supplies, and 
what should have been paid for them. I received 
no answer. I waited, hoping to hear ultimately 
that during his silence he had been honestly look- 
ing into the matter. I waited ten days. Then 
I wrote again, telling him what I had discovered 
and asking him what it meant. 

This brought Mr. Fred Watts, a member of the 
Board, to ask my stenographer: "What the devil's 
the matter with Ben ? Hasn't he got any grati- 
tude? Ask him what the hell he means." It 
brought also a number of political friends with 
the same question. One of them said: "Judge, 
those fellows may be guilty, and I believe they 
are, but it's not your place to show them up. You 
were appointed to your office by these men origin- 
ally, and you ought to stand by your friends." I 
went to a fellow-judge and told him what I had 
discovered. He replied: "I don't want to know 
about it. I don't want to be in any way respon- 
sible. You had better let the whole thing alone. 
You know what politics are in this town. It's 
the District Attorney's place to investigate — 



116 THE BEAST 

not yours." I did not believe that District Attor- 
ney Lindsley would investigate, except under 
pressure, and I asked this judge if he would join 
me in demanding that Lindsley should investi- 
gate. He replied: "No, no. I'll have nothing to 
do with it." Other judges made similar replies. 
A county official said: "Lindsey, those men 
appointed me to my office here, and I don't give 
a d — — if they steal the county blind. It will 
ruin you, if you have anything to do with it. 
Keep out of it if you want to have any future in 
politics !" 

I went on with my court work, carrying this 
guilty secret in my mind; and it was as heavy as 
remorse. I kept coming back to it, examining 
and reexamining the bills, and comparing them 
with the prices that I got from other stationers 
from time to time. And the more I thought of 
it, the worse it seemed. Finally I wrote a per- 
emptory letter to the Commissioners threaten- 
ing them that if they did not do something in 
the matter I should move for an investigation 
myself. 

My previous letters had been merely polite raps 
on a locked door. This last one had the effect of 
threatening to burst in with a sledge hammer. 
Tom Phillips,* the chairman of the Board, rushed 
out of his silence to assure me of his own inno- 
cence and accuse two other members, Fred Watts 

♦Phillips is now head of the Street Sprinkling Department ia Denver. 



THE BEAST, GRAFT AND BUSINESS 117 

and Frank Bishop. They promptly followed with 
messages accusing Phillips of grafting on bridge 
contracts, and demanding an investigation into 
the bridge contracts if there was to be one into the 
stationery supplies. Through Phillips, I got access 
to the county files, had copies made of all the 
stationery bills I could find, and appointed an 
investigating committee on my own responsibility 
to draw up a report — a committee consisting of 
a wholesale stationer, a lawyer, and the Clerk of 
our court. Their investigation showed that dur- 
ing the sixteen months previous to April, 1902, 
the county, on the bills that we had obtained, 
had paid Smith-Brooks about $40,000 more than 
the supplies were worth. 

What was worse, we found that the county 
specifications for the contract were worded in 
such a way that honest bids under them were 
impossible. For example, Smith-Brooks would 
offer to sell a 26-page index for $12, and a 52-page 
index for $1. No one could afford to sell a 52- 
page index, as specified, for $1 ; and, of course, 
none was ordered from Smith-Brooks at that fig- 
ure. The county always bought the smaller index 
for twelve times the cost of the larger one. But 
if a printer who did not "stand in" with the Com- 
missioners had made such a bid, the Board could 
have put him into bankruptcy. Paper, envelopes, 
court blanks and all other stationery supplies were 
bought in the same way. It was clearly a contract 



118 THE BEAST 

of disguised fraud arranged and carried out by 
both Smith-Brooks and the County Board. 

I give all these tiresome details, because of what 
followed. And the reason for what followed was 
at the time not clear to me. I was in the jungle 
again — a jungle of petty graft and public robbery, 
assailed on all sides by political animosities, little 
spites, threats and insults. And in the tangle of 
intricate intrigue, distracted by buffets from all 
sides, in despair of honesty in any quarter, I could 
no more than struggle blindly ahead, bewildered 
and half dazed. 

In order that what followed may not be as 
bewildering in the recital as it was in the fact, let 
me explain that the County Commissioners were 
valuable to the utility corporations in two ways: 
they claimed and exercised power, under the law, 
to raise or lower assessments, and to equalize and 
rebate taxes; and they appointed the "judges of 
elections" who were supposed to guard the ballot 
boxes from fraudulent votes. They had reduced 
the assessment of the Denver Union Water Com- 
pany from $1,000,000 to $300,000 — the water 
company whose property was recently valued by 
its own appraisers at $14,400,000. In the years 
1901 and 1902 the Denver Union Water Company 
and the Denver City Tramway Company had had 
their taxes rebated nearly $200,000 by these Com- 
missioners whom I was accusing. By an illegal 
legal proceeding they remitted fines imposed by the 



THE BEAST, GRAFT AND BUSINESS 119 

courts on dive keepers who were "in right" with 
the System. (See case Supreme Court of Colorado 
5662, Taylor vs. Kelleher, reported 97 Pacific, 253.) 
Many election judges whom they appointed were 
notorious crooks. The Board, in fact, was a vital 
and sensitive part of the Beast, situated mid- 
way in the barrel of its body, where the man w r ho 
attacked it came within reach of all its fore and 
hind claws. 

The hind claws reached for me first. I began 
to receive perfumed notes from unknown young 
women, inviting me to meet them at various places 
downtown. Not having been accustomed to 
receive such billets-doux, I thought some practical 
joker among my friends was making game of me; 
and I merely filed the letters w T ith the court corres- 
pondence, and did not answer them. Then one 
"Len" Rogers, whom I knew as a member of the 
Democratic Club, and an election crook, came to 
me one evening, w r ith a verbal invitation of a sim- 
ilar sort from a young woman who, he assured me, 
was "crazy" about me. I had no overwhelming 
desire to meet any of "Len" Rogers's young ladies, 
but I did not tell him so. I said I was busy. He 
was not discouraged. He came back again another 
night with a more pressing invitation. I became 
curious. Where did the young lady live? He 
named a section of Curtis Street where there were 
a number of houses of ill-repute; and I found out, 
afterward — from a friendly newspaper reporter 



120 THE BEAST 

who heard the story, as reporters do — that sev- 
eral members of "the gang" were waiting for me, 
in the house, to expose me as a libertine if I came 
there. (I wonder how often the Beast has suc- 
ceeded in this little game? Did you ever notice 
how many reformers are nipped in the beginning 
of a career by a timely scandal ?) 

Having failed to catch me in that way, an investi- 
gation of my private life was started. Fortunately 
I had no private life worth investigating. My 
life — what there was of it — had all been public; 
and I had been too poor and too busy to get into 
mischief. The sleuthing gave me an uncomfort- 
able feeling of being watched and hunted, but 
nothing "eventuated," as the newspapers say. 
After that came threats — vague threats of public 
dishonour — the end of my political career ! Child- 
ish threats and childish persecutions. The engin- 
eer of the Court House would cut off the electric 
light in my chambers at night when I was work- 
ing with our "investigating committee"; and our 
investigation was actually carried on by the light 
of candles that we bought at the corner drugstore. 
The janitor refused to clean our offices until the 
closets became so unsanitary that we had to appeal 
to the Board of Health. I became a sort of out- 
cast among the county officials, and no one would 
speak to me in the corridors. As I went to my 
court room, men would mutter, for me to hear: 
"There's the perjured little- !" I found 



THE BEAST, GRAFT AND BUSINESS 121 

myself avoided on the streets and shunned on the 
cars; and friends came to me with scandalous sto- 
ries that were being circulated about me downtown. 
For the first time in my life I thanked my lucky 
stars that I was not married. I began to feel as 
if I were living in a nightmare. It is impossible 
to convey the effect of it — but it was effective. 
Oh, the Beast knows how to fight ! 

It was effective and it was not; for besides get- 
ting on my nerves it got on my temper. I pushed 
on the work of investigation, resolved to reply to 
the covert attacks on me by a public exposure that 
should at least let in the light upon the struggle. 
At once all my old friends in the Democracy flocked 
to me, pleading with me not to ruin the party's 
chances in the next election by publishing the scan- 
dal. Mr. John T. Bottom, then attorney for the 
Commissioners, made the same plea. "After the 
elections, Judge," he promised, "we'll bring suit 
and recover the money." He begged me to spare 
"the boys," and not be an "ingrate." He quoted 
lines from "Julius Caesar" about the ambition 
that climbs a ladder and then scorns the "base 
degrees" by which it ascended. He came with 
two of the guilty Commissioners, Fred Watts and 
Frank Bishop, to my chambers, and I had to face 
their appeals not to ruin them and disgrace their 
families. (Bishop was then a candidate for Gov- 
ernor, and I had always thought a good deal of 
him.) They reminded me that they had made 



122 THE BEAST 

me County Judge in the first place. That took 
me on the raw. I said: "It was not your office. 
It belongs to the people. I am serving them, not 
you. Do you think because you used your pub- 
lic trust to appoint me a judge that I must let you 
steal ? Besides, I wrote you letters, friendly let- 
ters, about these outrageous bills a month ago, 
and you did nothing. That contract with Smith- 
Brooks is still in force. Supplies are being deliv- 
ered to my court, for which I am responsible, at 
outrageous prices. You have acted like a lot of 
thieves and grafters — and you keep it up — and 
you want me to protect you in it. I won't do it. 
I'm going to make my report public. If this steal- 
ing is to go on, it must go on in public. I refuse 
to protect it and be a silent party in it. I'll pub- 
lish my report." 

It was published in the Democratic paper, 
The Rocky Mountain News, on June 11, 1902. 

You think, perhaps, that it made a great stir. 
And it did. But if you think that the Commis- 
sioners were immediately indicted and condemned, 
you are as simple as I was. They were first 
allowed to appoint an investigating committee of 
two men friendly to them ; and I — after a public 
protest — was allowed to appoint a third member, 
the printer who had been on my first committee. 
Their investigation was a farce, but it had one 
serious aspect for me. The business men who 
had given me the price lists, etc., on which we had 



THE BEAST, GRAFT AND BUSINESS 123 

founded our first report — men who had said to 
me that the Commissioners were " thieves 5 ' and 
the Smith-Brooks Company were "thieves" — 
went to the witness stand before this white-washing 
committee and testified for Smith-Brooks and for 
the Commissioners. They could not "afford" to 
hurt their business, they confessed to me. One 
stationer whom I knew as an honest man and a 
prominent church member, said to me: "What! 
Do you expect me to go on the witness stand and 
tell what I told you? Never. I do business with 
the county. It'd ruin me." I found that he had 
a "sub-contract" with the principal contractor for 
supplies, and when he appeared in court, it was as 
advisor to the grafters. (The Beast is to the 
business man what the "Black Hand" is to the 
Mulberry Street banker.) 

I was not allowed to appear before this com- 
mittee, although I offered to testify; and at the 
conclusion of the "investigation" the two friends 
of the Commissioners made a report exonerating 
them. This, however, did not stay the public 
clamour. The News kept insisting that the Dis- 
trict Attorney, Harry A. Lindsley, must prosecute. 
It became evident that he must either do so or 
ruin himself in the public estimation. And in July 
the three Commissioners were charged with a mis- 
demeanour — instead of & felony — under a statute 
that provided, as the extreme penalty of guilt, a 
fine of $300 and dismissal from office — and the 



124 THE BEAST 

Commissioners were about to go out of office, in 
any case. 

It was nearly a year before we could get them 
brought to trial, and in the meantime — October 
and November, 1902 — Mr. Charles J. Hughes, 
Jr., attorney for the tramway company, assisted 
by the company's agent, William G. Smith (whom 
I had know^n as Speaker of the House of Repre- 
sentatives) obtained from the accused Commis- 
sioners a rebate of $70,000 on back taxes owed by 
the tramway company. Judge Peter L. Palmer 
dismissed the injunction proceedings that had been 
begun by the Municipal League, to prevent the 
granting of the rebate. And John T. Bottom, 
attorney for the Commissioners, favoured and 
argued for the rebate. "Is it possible," the Den- 
ver Post asked editorially, "that the fact that 
Charles J. Hughes, Jr., is also attorney for the 
Commissioners in the criminal cases brought 
against them in connection with the county print- 
ing steals has had anything to do with the Board's 
action in this matter of tax compromise with the 
tramway?" It had seemed to me that it was 
faintly possible; and the possibility became less 
faint with every day that followed. 

The elections had come on. I was interested in 
the contest for various reasons, but I was as care- 
fully shunned by politicians as if it had been I, and 
not the Commissioners, w r ho was accused of crime. 
A friend who was a member of the Democratic 



THE BEAST, GRAFT AND BUSINESS 125 

Executive Committee went so far as to invite me 
to a meeting of the committee with the ward lead- 
ers and such — being able, under the rules, to 
invite one initiated guest to the council — but he 
did it only after I had pledged myself not to say 
who invited me. I went. And heavens! What 
a reception! 

The meeting was held in the Windsor Hotel, 
in a long and narrow back room that had been 
stripped of everything but chairs, ranged along the 
walls for the "leaders," and a small table for the 
chairman and his secretary. Bill Davoren* pre- 
sided — the redoubtable Bill — with his small 
head broadly based on his pink jowls. The " inter- 
ests" never had a more faithful trencherman than 
"Bill." The grafting Commissioners were con- 
spicuous to his left. The District Attorney, Harry 
A. Lindsley, was equally conspicuous to his right. 
Along the walls a galaxy of "the gang" was seated, 
somewhat in the order of importance. I slid into 
a chair near the door, scowled at, snubbed and 
carefully avoided even by those who, I knew, were 
not unfriendly to me. I was a political leper among 
clean men. 

As soon as proceedings began, Harry Lindsley 
made a motion that no one should be allowed to 
address the meeting except members of the exec- 
utive committee, unless called upon by the chair- 
man. After some significant glances in my direc- 

•Davoren is now president of the Denver Fire and Police Board. 



1-26 THE BEAST 

tion, the motion was carried. I did not speak — 

except once. That was to remark, to a man next 
me, that one of the candidates named for an office 
was "a good man for the place.'' I was over- 
heard. My commendation was passed along the 
line; and the name of the candidate was promptly 
crossed off the slate! ("Hell!" a friend of his said 
to me. "what did you say that for?" I apolo- 
gized.) 

I had been warned not to "'start the commis- 
sioner business." "You know." my friend had 
told me. "we've got to get our election judges 
appointed, and Tom Phillips says if we don't 
stand by him and the other Commissioners, they'll 
appoint men that'll knife us at the polls." But 
the air was full of "the commissioner business." 
The Xeirs was charging that the "grafters' ring" 
was in control of the party. There was a popular 
demand for their repudiation. And some one at 
this executive meeting proposed a plank in the 
Democratic platform declaring, mildly, for hon- 
estv in Diiblic office and an investigation of anv 
alleged dishonesty. 

Tom Phillips, in an angry outburst, maintained 
that this plank was a reflection on the Commis- 
sioners. ''We won't stand for it." he -aid. "We 
won't stand for it." And in a confused and some- 
what befuddled harangue, he threatened that if 
the plank was inserted he would do what he 
would do. 



THE BEAST, GRAFT AND BUSINESS 127 

"Dear people/ 5 behold your politicians! They 
did not dare declare for any investigations of hon- 
esty in public office. Mr. Chas. J. Hughes, Jr., 
— who is now United States Senator from Colo- 
rado, and was then attorney for the tramway com- 
pany — Chas. J. Hughes, the cleverest corpora- 
tion lawyer at the Colorado bar, wealthy, 
honoured, brainy, and distinguished — Chas. J. 
Hughes rose to oppose the resolution, in a ring- 
ing and eloquent speech. Had not these Com- 
missioners served their party and their county 
faithfully for many years ? Should the party turn 
upon them now? They had not been tried. 
They had not been found guilty. No, no. No 
declaration for any investigations of honesty in 
public office for Mr. Chas. J. Hughes. And 
after some satirical shafts directed toward the 
obscure corner in which I sat, he concluded a 
corporation attorney's defence of a corporation's 
tools in office, with an appeal that carried the day. 

The plank was voted down. I do not remem- 
ber that any "leader" at the caucus except ex- 
Governor Thomas, said even a mild word in 
defence of honesty and in support of an investiga- 
tion. 

At the party convention, next day, I appeared 
by proxy — I was not a delegate — to make a 
speech in support of this declaration for "hon- 
esty in public office" (with no names mentioned), 
which Mr, Ed. Keating of the Rocky Mountain 



i£S THE BEAST 

News was to propose. The chairman of the 
convention was the attorney for Smith-Brooks! 
John T. Bottom, attorney for the Commissioners, 
met me on the floor and threatened that if I 
opened my mouth I should be accused before the 
convention of something awful, something damn- 
ing, something, however, unspecified ! I told him 
to go ahead and be as awful as he chose. Keat- 
ing proposed the resolution, and I tried to speak 
to it, but we were howled down with contempt and 
anger, curses and execrations. We were treated 
as if we had been a pair of rowdies who had inter- 
rupted, with profanity and an unclean presence, 
a meeting in a church. I shall never forget the 
angry indignation in the eyes of some of the dele- 
gates about me. 

I began to ask myself: "What have I done? 
Am I really the sort of despicable hound that I 
seem to appear to these fellow-Democrats?" I 
actually began to wonder whether I might not be 
some sort of political renegade, incapable of appre- 
ciating my own treason. And yet, some way, I 
could not see that I was ! 

When Bryan came to town, a great mass-meet- 
ing was held for him; and all the county judges — 
excepting myself — and all the county officials — 
including the three grafting Commissioners — were 
invited to sit on the platform behind him. I 
squeezed into the crowded hall and watched the 
Commissioners, on the stage, lead the rip-roaring 



THE BEAST, GRAFT AND BUSINESS 129 

applause that greeted Mr. Bryan's fervid defence 
of the people and the people's rights. I knew, of 
course, that the officials would return next day to 
the Court House, and send an order for supplies to 
a "prominent business man" that would read 
something like this: "One dozen letter files, 
$72" (value $4.80); "one thousand sheets of 
ruled paper, $280" (value $10); "fifty index 
books, $600" (value $30). And when Roose- 
velt came to town, the "prominent business man" 
(being a Republican) would cheer Roosevelt as 
wildly as the Commissioners cheered Bryan. And 
the people's rights would be safe. Quite safe. 

Do not imagine that I am cynical. I am not 
attacking men. I am attacking the conditions that 
debauch men. I am not attacking these victims 
of the Beast and the System; I am trying to 
show the power of the Beast and the effects of 
the System. "Judge," Tom Phillips once said 
to me, "if these big guys, who put up the money 
to elect us, expect us to help their big graft of hun- 
dreds of thousands in rebates of taxes to their 
corporations, why shouldn't we get a little on the 
side?" "And, Judge," the prominent business 
man pleaded, "I've got to do business with these 
people. They can ruin me in a week if they want 
to. I can't afford to quarrel with my bread and 
butter." "And, Judge," a beady-eyed little crook 
said to me one day in my chambers, "I read the 
papers. I know what's goin' on in this burg. 



130 THE BEAST 

What do you want to jump on me fer? I ain't 
swipin' the way those fullahs is." 

Long before the Commissioners came up for 
trial I knew that it was I who was to be tried, not 
they. They were to be acquitted, vindicated, and 
I was to be "put in a hole." The sheriff was 
friendly to the "accused." The jury was made 
up of their friends and of men with whom they 
did business. The judge was brought in from 
Pueblo County, where the Colorado Fuel and Iron 
Company controlled the political machine, and he 
had aspirations. Cass Herrington, counsel for the 
Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, acted as a 
sort of silent attorney for the defence. Charles 
J. Hughes, Jr., attorney for the corporations, 
was the chief counsel, and when he got me in the 
witness box what a time he had, to be sure! Dis- 
trict Attorney Lindsley refused to appear in court 
against the grafters, but I had a friend in his 
office, a deputy attorney, George Allen Smith, 
and for his attempt to convict the grafters he was 
forced later to resign his place. The strain of 
the trial and of the persecutions that accompanied 
it, wore me out. I was ill. I heard on all sides 
that the Commissioners were to be acquitted and 
that I was to be prosecuted for perjury. I heard 
it from men in the District Attorney's office, from 
newspaper reporters, from county officials. I over- 
heard men talking of it in the corridors. I saw 
it in the exulting eyes of enemies in my court 



THE BEAST, GRAFT AND BUSINESS 131 

room. And when, on the morning that the ver- 
dict was returned, the old bailiff of my court came 
running up to the bench where I sat hearing cases 
in a sick despondence, I nearly fainted in my 
chair when he whispered: "They've found 'em 
guilty!" 

How ! How did it happen ? Why, one of the 
jurors argued: "Boys, these fellows are only 
charged with a misdemeanour. The worst they 
can get is a little fine. But if we acquit them on 
this charge and another District Attorney gets 
into office, he may charge them with a felony 
and get them sent to the penitentiary." And the 
friendly jury found them guilty of a misdemeanour 
to save them from a worse fate! "Judge," that 
juror said to me afterward, "no one'll ever get 
me into any graft investigations again. I was 
blamed for that verdict by the other fellows when 
the grafters went after them for it, and I tell you 
I've lost thousands of dollars in my business by 

it. And d them, I did it as a favour to 

them — to save them from the pen !" 

The Commissioners were furious. The Dis- 
trict Attorney was scared white. And the judge 
— Judge Voorhees, of Pueblo — well, here is part 
of his speech, from the newspapers of August 12, 
1903: 

"In passing sentence, this statute, while it is 
penal in its nature, as I look at it, does not brand 
these gentlemen as being criminals. I don't think 



132 THE BEAST 

the evidence in this case warrants any such con- 
clusion." He believed "these defendants to be 
honourable gentlemen." He did not ask them 
as ordinary criminals to "step up to be sentenced," 
but merely gave them "an opportunity, if any of 
them have anything to say," to say it before he 
passed sentence. And his sentence was a fine 
of ten dollars each! 

Do you blame the judge? Do you blame the 
jury, the District Attorney, the court officials, or 
even the accused ? Why should you ? Would you 
blame the girl who was ruined in the wine room 
or the dive keeper who was ruined to ruin her? 
Would you blame the boys who were polluted in 
the jails? Xo! They were the victims, not the 
authors, of their infamy. If you must blame some 
one, blame those heads of lawless public-service 
corporations in Colorado who corrupt judges, 
juries, legislators, public officials, political workers, 
gamblers, dive keepers, and prostitutes, so that 
they and their corporations may be safe above the 
law and in power to loot the people. They are 
the men. To them accrues the profit of this 
debauchery. Let them bear its shame. 



CHAPTER VIII 

AT WORK WITH THE CHILDREN 

THROUGH these two years of quarrelling and 
crusading, our court work for the children 
was going on very happily. It was a recreation 
for us all, and it kept me full of hope — for it was 
successful. We were getting the most unexpected 
results. We were learning something new every 
day. We were deducing, from what we learned, 
theories to be tested in daily practice, and then 
devising court methods by which to apply the 
theories that proved correct. It had all the fas- 
cination of scientific research, of practical inven- 
tion, and of a work of charity combined. It was 
a succession of surprises and a continual joy. 

I had begun merely with a sympathy for chil- 
dren and a conviction that our laws against crime 
were as inapplicable to children as they would be 
to idiots. I soon realized that not only our laws 
but our whole system of criminal procedure was 
wrong. It was based upon fear; and fear, with 
children, as with their elders, is the father of lies. 
I found that when a boy was brought before me, 
I could do nothing with him until I had taken the 
fear out of his heart; but once I had gotten rid 

133 



134 THE BEAST 

of that fear, I found — to my own amazement — 
that I could do anything with him. I could do 
things that seemed miraculous, especially to the 
police, who seldom tried anything but abuse and 
curses, and the more or less refined brutalities of 
the "sweat box" and the "third degree." I 
learned that instead of fear we must use sympathy, 
but without cant, without hypocrisy, and without 
sentimentalism. We must first convince the boy 
that we were his friends but the determined ene- 
mies of his misdeeds; that we wished to help him 
to do right, but could do nothing for him if he per- 
sisted in doing wrong. We had to encourage him 
to confess his wrongdoing, teach him wherein it 
had been wrongdoing, and strengthen him to do 
right thereafter. 

I found — what so many others have found — 
that children are neither good nor bad, but either 
strong or weak. They are naturally neither moral 
nor immoral — but merely unmoral. They are 
little savages, living in a civilized society that has 
not yet civilized them, often at war with it, fre- 
quently punished by it, and always secretly in 
rebellion against it, until the influences of the home, 
the school and the church gradually overcome their 
natural savagery and make them moral and 
responsible members of*society. The mistake of 
the criminal law had been to punish these little 
savages as if they had been civilized, and by so 
doing, in nine cases out of ten, make them crim- 



AT WORK WITH THE CHILDREN 135 

inal savages. Our work, we found, was to aid 
the civilizing forces — the home, the school, and 
the church — and to protect society by making the 
children good members of society instead of 
punishing them for being irresponsible ones. If 
we failed, and the child proved incorrigible, the 
criminal law could then be invoked. But the 
infrequency with which we failed was one of the 
surprises of the work. 

Take, for example, the case of Lee Martin and 
his "River Front Gang." He was a boy burg- 
lar, a sneak thief, a pickpocket, a jail breaker, 
and a tramp; and his "gang" was known to the 
newspapers as the most desperate band of young 
criminals in Denver. Lee Martin and another 
member of the gang, named Jack Heimel, were 
one night caught in a drugstore into which they , 
had broken; and when I went to see them in jail, 
I found them strapped to the benches in their 
cells, bruised and battered from an interview with 
the police, in which they had been punished for 
refusing to "snitch" (tell) on their fellow-mem- 
bers of the gang. This was before the passage 
of our juvenile court laws and I wished to have 
an opportunity to try what I could do with these 
two boys. The police did not wish me to have 
them. 

I told the boys that I intended to try to help 
them, and they sneered at me. I told them that 
I thought they had not been given "a square 



136 THE BEAST 

deal" — which was true — but they did not re- 
spond. I used what tact and sympathy I could 
to draw them out and get their side of the story 
of their war with society, but it took me some- 
thing like a month of frequent visits to get them to 
trust me and to believe that I wished to help them. 
In the end I was successful. I got their story — 
a story too long to repeat here; but it proved to 
me that the boys had been as much sinned against 
as sinning. They had begun as irresponsible lit- 
tle savages, and they had been made desperate 
young criminals. Their parents had failed to 
civilize them, and the school and the church had 
never had an opportunity to try. I resolved to see 
if it was too late to begin. 

The police captain assured me that it was. 
"You can't 'baby 5 Lee Martin," he said. "He's 
been in jail thirteen times, and it hasn't done him 
any good." 

"Well, I'd like to see what we can do," I 
replied. "If we fail, we'll still have twelve 
times the best of the jail. It has cost this city, 
in officers' fees alone, over a thousand dollars to 
make a criminal of him. Let us see how much 
it will cost to turn him into an honest boy." 

The officer reeled off a long list of Martin's 
offences, and I retorted by showing a typewritten 
record of them, twice as long. "How in the 
world did you get 'em, Judge?" he said. "We 
couldn't sweat 'em out of him." 



AT WORK WITH THE CHILDREN 137 

After a week of such argument, we got the 
case referred to our court. The boys were tried; 
and, of course, their guilt w^as clear. I sent them 
back to the jail under suspended sentence, and 
thought the matter over. 

One night I had them brought to my chambers 
under guard, and after a talk with Heimel I sent 
him and the guard away, and concentrated on 
Martin. I decided to put my influence over 
him to the test. I told him of the fight I was 
making for him, showed him how I had been 
spending all my spare time "trying to straighten 
things out" for him and Heimel, and warned him 
that the police did not believe I could succeed. 
"Now, Lee," I said, "you can run away if you 
want to, and prove me a liar to the cops. But 
I want to help you, and I w r ant you to stand by 
me. I want you to trust me, and I want you to 
go back to the jail there, and let me do the best 
I can." 

He went. And he went alone — unguarded. 

Then I put him and Heimel on probation, and 
in a few days they came to see me and brought 
"Red" Mike and Tommie Green, of the "River 
Front Gang." I talked to them about their offences 
against the law, and told them I wanted to help 
them do what was right and live honest lives, 
unpersecuted by the police; and I praised Martin 
for his moral strength in going back to the jail 
alone. Before they left me, "Red" and Tommie 



138 THE BEAST 

had "snitched" on themselves, and I had two 
new probationers. One by one the others fol- 
lowed, until I had all seven members of the gang 
on my list, all confessed wrongdoers pledged 
to give up crime and make an honest effort to be 
"straight." Six of the seven are to-day honest 
young workmen; Lee Martin failed, after a long 
and plucky fight, and is now in the penitentiary. 
"The River Front Gang," to my knowledge, has 
been responsible for the reformation of thirty 
boys in Denver; and Lee Martin, in his time, did 
more to discourage crime than any policeman in 
the city. 

For example : one day a boy — whom I knew — 
stole a pocketbook from a woman in a department 
store. I told Lee that something ought to be done 
for that boy, and Lee brought him to me — from 
a cheap theatre where he had been "treating the 
gang." We worked on him together, and we 
straightened him up. He has since become a 
trusted employee in the very store in which he stole 
the pocketbook. 

In another instance, I sent Lee after a boy, 
arrested for stealing a watch, who had sawed his 
way out of jail and had not been recaptured by 
the police. Lee got him — in El Paso — and 
brought him to me. After a talk with him, I gave 
him a twenty-dollar bill and sent him, alone, 
unshadowed, to redeem the watch, which he had 
pawned for $3. He returned with the watch and 



AT WORK WITH THE CHILDREN 139 

the $17 change. Then I persuaded him to return 
the watch to the man from whom he had stolen it, 
and, of course, the prosecution against him was 
dropped. We have never since had a complaint 
against that boy, although he had been one of the 
worst boy thieves in the city. 

I could relate cases of this sort interminably. I 
have related them, in newspaper interviews, in 
magazine articles, and from the public platform. 
And I find that many people have misunderstood 
me and have accepted my statements as evidence 
that I have some sort of hypnotic power over boys 
and can make them do things contrary to their 
natures. I can not. I do nothing that any man 
or woman cannot do by the same method. It is 
the method that works the miracle — although, of 
course, no one in his senses will claim that the 
method never fails, that there are no cases in 
which force and punishment have to be used. 

Another lesson about boys I learned from little 
"Mickey" — when I w^as investigating his charge 
that the jailer had beaten him. The jailer said: 
"Some o' those kids broke a window in there, and 
when I asked Mickey who it was he said he didn't 
know. O' course he knew. D' you think I'm 
goin' to have kids lie to me?" A police com- 
missioner who was present turned to Mickey: 
"Mickey," he said, "why did you lie?" Mickey 
faced us, in his rags. "Say," he asked, "do yuh 
t'ink a fullah ought to snitch on a kid ? " And the 



140 THE BEAST 

way he asked it made me ashamed of myself. 
Here was a quality of loyalty that we should be 
fostering in him instead of trying to crush out of 
him. It was the beginning, in the boy, of that 
feeling of responsibility to his fellows on which 
society is founded. Thereafter no child brought 
before our court was ever urged to turn state's 
evidence against his partners in crime — much less 
rewarded for doing so, or punished for refusing to 
do so. Each was encouraged to "snitch" on him- 
self, and himself only. 

Still another lesson I learned from an inveterate 
little runaway named Harry. After several attempts 
to reform him, I sentenced him to the Industrial 
School in Golden; and this being before the days 
of the Detention School, he was returned to the jail 
until a sheriff could "take him up." That night 
the jailer telephoned me that Harry was in hys- 
terics, screaming in his cell and calling wildly to 
me to help him. "You'd better come down, 
Judge," the jailer said, "an 5 see if you can get 
him quiet." I went to the jail. Inside, the steel 
doors were opened and the steel bolts withdrawn, 
one by one, with a portentous clanking and grating. 
It was as if we were about to penetrate to some 
awful dungeon in which a murderous giant was 
penned — so formidable were the iron obstacles 
that were swung back before us and clashed shut 
on our heels. And when I reached, at the end of 
a guarded corridor, the barred door of Harry's 



AT WORK WITH THE CHILDREN 141 

cell, there, in the dim glow of a light overhead, 
the boy lay asleep on the floor, his round little 
legs drawn up, his head pillowed on his tiny arm, 
his baby face pale under the prison lamp. The 
sight was so pitifully ridiculous that I choked up 
at it. It seemed such a folly — such a cruel 
folly — to lock up a child in such a place of lonely 
terror. 

The jailer opened the cell door for me, and I 
began to raise the boy to put him on his prison 
"stretcher." His head fell back over my arm, 
like an infant's. He woke with a start and 
clutched me, in a return of the hysterical fear that 
had been mercifully forgotten in sleep. And then, 
when he recognized me, "Judge," he pleaded, 
"Judge. Gi' me another chance. I'll be good. 
Judge! Just once — once more. Judge!" I 
had to sit down beside him on the floor and try 
to reassure him. 

I tried to be stern with him. I told him that 
I had trusted him and trusted him again and 
again; and he had failed me every time. I 
explained that we were sending him to the Indus- 
trial School for his own good, to make a "strong" 
boy of him; that he was "weak," untrustworthy. 
"I can help you, Harry," I said. "But you've 
got to carry yourself. If I let boys go when they 
do bad things, I'll lose my job. The people'll 
get another judge, in my place, to punish boys, 
if I don't do it. I can't let you go." 



142 THE BEAST 

We went over it and over it ; and at last I 
thought I had him feeling more resigned and 
cheerful, and I got up to leave him. But when 
I turned to the door, he fell on his knees before 
me and stretching out his little arms to me, his 
face distorted with tears, he cried: "Judge! 
Judge! If you let me go, Til never get you into 
trouble again!" 

I had him ! It w^as the voice of loyalty. " Mac," 
I said to the jailer, "this boy goes with me. I'll 
write an order for his release/ ' 

I took him to his home that night, but his mother 
did not wish to have him back. Her husband 
had deserted her; she worked all day in a hotel 
kitchen; she could not take proper care of her 
boy, and she was afraid that he would be killed 
on some of his long "bumming" trips in the 
freight cars. But she finally consented to give 
him another trial; and this time he "stuck." 
"Judge," she told me long afterward, "I asked 
Harry, the other day, how it was he was so good 
for you, when he wouldn't do it for me or the 
policeman. And he says: 'Well, maw, you see 
if I gets bad agin, the Judge he'll lose his job. 
I've got to stay with him, 'cause he stayed with 
me." I have used that appeal to loyalty hun- 
dreds of times since, in our work with the boys, 
and it is almost infallibly successful. 

I saw, too, from Harry's case, that if we were 
to reform children we must help parents who 



AT WORK WITH THE CHILDREN 143 

were unable to keep a close watch on their chil- 
dren. And nowadays if one of our probationers 
fails to arrive at school, the teacher is required 
to telephone the Juvenile Court immediately, 
and a probation officer starts out at once to find 
the delinquent. Every two weeks, on "report 
day," the probationers must bring us reports on 
their behaviour from the school, the home and 
the neighbourhood; and by praising those who 
have good reports and censuring those who have 
bad ones, we are not only able to prevent wrong- 
doing but to encourage right-doing. We impress 
on the children the need of doing right because 
it is right, because it "hurts to do wrong," because 
only "weak kids" do wrong — not because 
wrong is punished; for that teaching, I believe, 
is the great error of our ethics. The fear of pun- 
ishment, I find, makes weak children liars and 
hypocrites, and, with strong ones, it adds to the 
enticement of evil all the proverbial sweetness of 
forbidden fruit. 

During the first two years of our work, 554 
children were put on probation; only 31 were 
ever returned to the court again, and of these 
31 a number were returned and sent to Golden 
because of the hopelessness of reforming them 
in their squalid homes. 

One evening a probationer brought four boys 
to my chambers with the announcement that they 
wished to "snitch" on themselves. They had 



144 THE BEAST 

been stealing bicycles — making a regular prac- 
tice of it — and they had five such thefts to their 
discredit. I investigated their story and found 
it to be true. The police had a complete record 
of the thefts, and I tried — and got the boys to 
try — to recover the wheels, but we could not ; 
they had been sold and resold and quite lost 
track of. A police officer, with whom I con- 
sulted, insisted that the boys should be arrested 
and sentenced to jail ; and while I listened to him 
it dawned upon me what the difference was between 
the criminal procedure and the methods of our 
court. "Officer," I said, "you are trying to 
save bicycles. I am trying to save boys. The 
boys are more important than the bicycles. And 
if we can save the boys we can save bicycles in 
the future that we could not save in the past." 
I put the boys on probation, with the under- 
standing that if they did not live up to their new 
resolve to be honest, I should be allowed to use 
their confessions against them. Not one of them 
failed me. The court helped them to get work 
and they are honest and useful members of soci- 
ety to-day. 

In one year 201 boys came in this way to 
our court, voluntarily, and confessed their wrong- 
doing, and promised to "cut it out." 

One evening, after I had adjourned court and 
the room had emptied, I saw a youngster sitting 
in a chair by the rear wall, apparently forgotten 



AT WORK WITH THE CHILDREN 145 

by his parents. He was no bigger than a baby. 
I sent the bailiff to ask him if he knew his name 
or his address. He came up to the bench — to 
my chair on the platform — and hiding his face 
against my shoulder he began to cry. He had 
been "swipin' things," he said, and wanted to 
"cut it out." And would I give him a chance — 
as I had another boy he knew? We gave him 
a chance. He reported regularly, for more than 
a year, and proved to be an honest, sturdy boy. 
Another boy who came to my chambers with a 
similar confession was so small that I said to 
him, "You're a mighty little boy. How did you 
find your way down here?" "Well," he replied, 
"most every kid I seed knew the way." I found 
that nearly all these boys were members of neigh- 
bourhood "gangs," that some member of the 
gang had been in court, had gone back to the 
gang with the lessons we had tried to teach him 
and had used his influence to send the other boys 
to us. We began to reach for this gang spirit and 
to turn it to our uses instead of against us; and 
we succeeded there, too, in time. I could relate 
scores of stories that came to us of how the gangs 
threatened to "beat up" some young delinquent 
if he did not play "square with the Judge." 
We taught the boys who had been doing wrong 
that they should try to "overcome the evil" they 
had done, by now doing something good; and 
they practised that doctrine by persuading their 



146 THE BEAST 

companions to desist from some mischief they 
had planned. 

I even had a little newsboy come to me with 
the assurance that if I wanted the "street kids" 
to stop "shooting craps/ 5 I need only go down 
and tell them so. "Dhere ain't a kid in dhe 
whole push," he said, "dhat won't go down the 
line wit' yuh, Judge. Dhe cops can't make 'em 
stop craps, but I bet dhey'd do it fer you" I 
did not try it. I did not believe that I could per- 
manently stop street boys shooting craps; it is 
as natural for them to gamble as for schoolboys 
to play marbles. But I rejoiced in the loyalty, 
the spirit of cooperation, shown by these street 
gamins. Therein lies the success of the Juven- 
ile Court. 

In the days before we got our Detention School 
any boy sentenced to the Industrial School at 
Golden had to be returned to the jail to wait 
until a deputy sheriff could "take him up." I 
found that the deputies were keeping the boys in 
jail until there were several under sentence, and 
then making one trip and charging the county 
mileage on each boy. Petty graft again! And 
conditions in the jail were as I have already 
described them. 

I tried to make the deputies take the boys sepa- 
rately, immediately after sentence; but I did 
not succeed. The grafters were protected by the 
politicians, and I was powerless. "Very well," 



AT WORK WITH THE CHILDREN 147 

I said, "I'll see whether I cannot send these boys 
to Golden alone, without any guard, and cut 
out your fees entirely." And I succeeded. 

I took each boy into my chambers and told 
him that I wanted him to go to Golden. "Now," 
I would say, "if you think I'm making a mistake 
in trying to save you — if you think you're not 
worth saving — don't go. Run away, if you 
feel that way about it. I can't help you if you 
don't want to help yourself. You've been a 
weak boy. You've been doing bad things. I 
want you to be a strong boy and do what's right. 
We don't send boys to Golden to punish them. 
We do it to help them. They give you a square 
deal out there — teach you a trade so you can 
earn an honest living and look anybody in the 
face. I'm not going to bring a deputy in here 
and handcuff you and have you taken away like 
that. Here are your commitment papers. Go 
yourself and go alone — or don't go at all if 
you don't think I'm trying to help you and 
sending you there for your own good." And 
invariably, the boy went. In eight years, out 
of 507 cases, I had only five failures. One 
of these was a boy who thought he was being 
followed and who ran away instinctively "to 
beat the game." Another was a boy who con- 
fessed that he couldn't "make it," because the 
route to Golden led him past his old "stamping 
grounds"; and when I gave him tickets over 



148 THE BEAST 

another route, he made the trip successfully. A 
third was an hysterical youngster who got as far 
as the railroad station with an older lad, but 
broke down there and could not go on. None 
of the failures were outright; and none of the 
boys were lost. (During these eight years, the 
police, I was told, lost forty-two "breakaways" 
who were never recovered.) And we saved the 
county several thousand dollars in mileage fees. 

One boy, whom the police considered the 
worst little runaway in town, took his papers and 
delivered himself at Golden while the police 
waited, with expectant grins, to hear that he had 
made off; and those police were so sure he would 
fail me that they had two reporters "tipped off" 
to watch the case and write it up. I have had 
a young burglar, on trial, escape from the court 
room and evade the police — only to come to my 
house at midnight and surrender himself to me, 
because his gang had told him that I would "be 
square" with him if he was "square" with me. 
And not only children have gone alone to jail. 
Grown men whom I have found guilty of "con- 
tributory delinquency" have done the same thing, 
satisfied that they had broken the laws and should 
bear the penalty. 

This achievement of our Juvenile Court has 
attracted more attention than anything else we 
have done; and yet it is not an isolated act; it 
is merely one of the results of the method. The 



AT WORK WITH THE CHILDREN 149 

criminal law is founded on vengeance. It treats 
all criminals as born criminals, incorrigible and 
unforgivable. It is designed to save property, 
not to save men; and it does neither: it makes 
more criminals than it crushes. I believe that 
the methods of our Juvenile Court could be applied 
to half the criminal cases on our calendars. The 
majority of our criminals are not born, but made 
— and ill-made. They can be re-made as easily 
as the " River Front Gang" was re-made if we would 
use the methods of Christianity on them and not 
those of a sort of fiendish paganism that exacts 
"an eye for an eye," and exacts it in a spirit of 
vengeance. 

Does this read as if I were "crazy" ? Do 
not think so. It is a conclusion based upon 
years of thoughtful experience. I have obtained 
a law in Colorado — the first of its kind in the 
history of jurisprudence, if that be anything against 
it ! — by which an adult accused of crime can 
be tried as our children are tried and aided and 
corrected by the state as "parens patrice, just as 
our children are aided and corrected. And I 
am willing to stake my faith on it that if our 
courts and our prisons ever learn how to work 
under such a law, you will see not only children 
but grown men and women going from the court 
rooms with their commitment papers in their 
hands and knocking on the gates of the prisons 
to be admitted. Crazy? When I first told one 



150 THE BEAST 

of our deputy sheriffs that in future I should send 
boys to Golden without him, he said to my 
clerk: "Well, I've always heard Lindsey was 
crazy, but I never believed it till to-day!" And 
when a hardened young criminal went, from 
my court, 250 miles to the Buena Vista refor- 
matory alone, and presented himself at the gates 
of the prison, "the sentry" (as I was afterward 
told) "almost fell off the walls." Crazy? Do 
you know that over half the inmates of reforma- 
tories, jails and prisons in this country are under 
twenty-five years of age? (Some authorities 
say under twenty-three.) Do you know that 
an English prison commission not long ago 
reported to Parliament that the age of sixteen 
to twenty was the essentially criminal age? Do 
you know that the Earl of Shaftesbury after 
much study declared that not two out of any 
hundred criminals in London had formed the 
habits that led to criminality after the twenti- 
eth year? I may be very crazy and yet not be 
as crazy as the people who in the face of these 
facts believe that the criminal methods of our 
civilization are anything but a gigantic crime 
and a stupendous folly. Some day our descend- 
ants will read of our methods of handling crimi- 
nals as we now read of how our ancestors impris- 
oned the insane in chains and used the methods 
of a Siberian jailer on the inmates of the mad- 
house! Never doubt it. Under our civil laws 



AT WORK WITH THE CHILDREN 151 

to-day Masters of Discipline could be appointed 
— as Masters in Chancery are appointed — to 
aid and correct delinquents, especially young 
delinquents, in our cities; to allow them to repent 
and make [reparation — as they cannot under 
our criminal procedure; to help them rise from 
immorality and clean their hands of crime — as 
no judge can help them now, without being guilty 
of " compounding a felony." That will come, 
some day. If not in our day, then so much the 
worse for us! 

I cannot conclude this chapter without add- 
ing the final lesson I learned in our work with 
the children — the lesson that leads me back 
again into the quarrel with the Beast. It is this: 
criminals are born and criminals are bred, but 
the conditions of which they are born and under 
which they are bred in Denver are the same con- 
ditions that debauch our Legislature, our judic- 
iary, our press, our business life, and our poor. 
I found no "problem of the children" that was 
not also the problem of their parents. The 
young bud was blighted by the same corruption 
that infected the twig, killed the branch and ate 
out the heart of the trunk. The rule of the plu- 
tocracy in Denver was the cause of three-quar- 
ters of the crime in Denver. The dependent and 
delinquent children who came into my court 
came almost wholly from the homes of depend- 
ent and delinquent parents who were made such 



152 THE BEAST 

by the hopeless economic conditions of their lives; 
and those conditions were made hopeless by the 
remorseless tyranny of wealthy men who used 
their lawless power to enslave and brutalize and 
kill their workmen. Legislatures, corrupted by 
corporate wealth, refused to pass the eight-hour 
law that would give the child's home a parent 
able to fulfil his parental duties — refused to 
pass the employer's liability law that would save 
the widows from starvation and the children 
from the streets — refused to pass even a "three- 
fourths jury" law that would allow the poor vic- 
tim of corporate greed to obtain a little pittance 
of justice in the courts. The saloons, protected 
by the political power of the corporations, de- 
bauched the parents and destroyed the homes 
of our children, and the protected gambler hunted 
and preyed with the protected saloon. I could 
not do my duty toward the children without 
attacking the conditions that deformed the lives 
of the children. And when I tried to do this — 
as you shall see — the Beast replied: "Then 
you shall not be allowed to save even the little 
children. 5 * 



CHAPTER IX 

THE BEAST AND THE BALLOT 

THESE days of 1902, 1903 and 1904 were 
the heydays of our Juvenile Court, and 
I should like to dwell upon them fondly — as 
the song says — because of what ensued. Our 
campaigns against the wine rooms, the jails, and 
the grafting Commissioners had made the court 
as popular as a prizefighter, and the newspapers 
kept it constantly in the public eye. The Denver 
Chamber of Commerce — (let me boast of it !) 
— invited me to luncheon, gave a reception in 
my honour, and praised me to the last blush. 
(This is the same Chamber that has since branded 
me an enemy of the state.) Philanthropic men 
and women assisted our Juvenile Improvement 
Association, helped with our charity benefits, 
and contributed to the Fresh Air Fund, the sum- 
mer camp, the day nursery, and other branches 
of our work, with all the delighted eagerness of 
Lady Bountiful herself. (At a recent "bene- 
fit" given in the aid of the Juvenile Court by Miss 
Olga Nethersole there were not two hundred 
persons in the whole house; and "Society" was 
conspicuously elsewhere.) Mr. Walter S. Chees- 

153 



154 THE BEAST 

man, president of the water company, was at the 
head of our Association, and if we needed money 
we had only to ask for it. (This is the same 
Walter S. Cheesman who afterward lent a vacant 
lot to a charity bazaar on condition that not a 
penny of the proceeds should go to the Juvenile 
Court work.) I was elected chairman of a 
building committee of the Y. M. C. A. (from which 
I afterward resigned when I found that my 
chairmanship hindered the work of raising money 
for the Association). I was made a member of 
the Board of Trustees of the Denver University. 
(And Miss Ida Tarbell could not have been 
removed from the Board of Rockefeller's Chicago 
college more shrewdly and softly than I was 
4 'transferred" from the Denver University Board 
when the days of my offence against the " inter- 
ests' ' developed.) In short I was receiving the 
same applause in Denver that Heney received 
in San Francisco before he turned from prose- 
cuting grafters to prosecuting the big business men 
and "leading citizens" who made the grafters. 

I had as yet done only one thing to offend busi- 
ness : that was the enforcement of the child-labour 
laws in 1902. Cotton mills had been established 
just outside of Denver, and poor families had 
been imported from Alabama and the Caroli- 
nas to work as operatives. I went through the 
factories, visited the homes and talked with the 
children; and I found that the awful labour con- 



THE BEAST AND THE BALLOT 155 

ditions of the Southern cotton mills had been 
transplanted to Colorado. The workers were 
practically slaves, for they had been imported 
under contract and had assigned part of their 
wages, in advance, to pay for transportation; 
and boys and girls from ten to twelve years of 
age were at work in the mills, without education 
and subject to the temptations of bad moral con- 
ditions, trying to help free their parents from the 
bondage of debt. 

We took proceedings against the company — 
in spite of an outcry that we were interfering with 
a prosperous industry that added to the wealth 
of the state — and we fined the owners and the 
superintendent the limit allowed by the law. 
One of the men of wealth interested in the mills 
came to my chambers and protested. He had 
lived in the community a good many years, he 
said, and he was no criminal. It was all right to 
fine the superintendent; the superintendent was 
responsible for the conditions at the mills. But 
it was all wrong to fine him, the owner; for he 
had a reputation and a good name and he did 
not propose to be branded a criminal. "We 
have never had any trouble," he said, "until this 
fight started. We're helping Denver, and we 
ought to be encouraged instead of being perse- 
cuted. I warn you, right now, that if this thing 
is kept up, we'll shut down the mills and you'll 
have to take the consequences." 



156 THE BEAST 

The thing was kept up. The children were 
forced to go to school. The mill shut down. 
And I became "an enemy of prosperity' ' — pros- 
perity founded upon the slavery of children and 
the stunting of young lives. 

The child-labour problem is a problem of the 
Beast. If you, who read this, live in a city or a 
state where the mill and the factory are enslav- 
ing helpless little children, understand that these 
children are the victims of the Beast. It lives upon 
them. You must fight it, if you would save them. 

We have had no child-labour problem in Denver 
since; but our work in ridding the city of it did 
not weigh heavily against the court, for the loss 
of the mills was not great enough to be offensive. 
The court continued to be popular; the politicians 
were aware of its popularity; they decided that 
its popularity would be a valuable political asset; 
and as I approached the end of my term of 
office, I was met by various advances on the 
part of those Democratic "leaders" who had 
so indignantly shunned and repudiated me at 
the time of the printing-steal exposures. I had, 
however, learned to be suspicious of politicians, 
especially "when they come bearing gifts." And 
I soon learned that the gift they offered me in 
this instance was a "gold brick. " Let me explain 
how I learned it. 

My experience on the bench and in politics 
has convinced me that the confessional fulfils a 



THE BEAST AND THE BALLOT 157 

need of humanity that is almost as instinctive 33 
the need of religion itself. I have found that 
among young criminals the desire to "snitch" 
on themselves is practically irresistible; on the 
slightest encouragement they blurt out the truth 
as if their tongues spoke in spite of them. Strang- 
est of all, the "bad" politicians, like the "bad" 
boys, have come to my chambers in scores, even 
while they were publicly fighting me, and confessed 
their crimes (sometimes before they committed 
them!) with a pitiful eagerness that would soften 
the heart of the bitterest cynic who ever sneered 
at human frailty. 

(The Beast could make them do its work, but 
it could not make them wholly bestial. There 
always remained in them some generous relent- 
ance that made them betray their faith with 
injustice. And in all the attacks that have been 
made upon me, in this curious struggle with the 
System, there has scarcely been a blow aimed at 
me of which I have not been forewarned. That, 
too, is one of the experiences of my life that has 
made me always hope.) 

While I was in forced retirement politically — 
because of my exposure of the grafting County 
Commissioners — I was kept constantly informed 
of the secrets of the System by these confessions 
of the System's tools. I was informed, particu- 
larly, of the way elections were managed so as 
to keep the Beast in power. 



158 THE BEAST 

Under the law, as we had it then, the County 
Clerk appointed the deputy clerks before whom 
the prospective voter appeared to have his name 
registered on the voters' lists; and the applicant 
had to bring with him two witnesses to swear 
that he had a legal right to vote. Well and good ! 
His name was duly entered on a sheet of paper, 
and these sheets were returned from the various 
wards to the Clerk's office, there to be copied 
into the registration books. But then the orig- 
inal sheets were destroyed; there was no way 
of tracing a fraudulent registration back to the 
clerk who had made it; and these clerks, at the 
bidding of the men who appointed them, turned 
in sheets of "phony" names copied from the 
pages of directories from Omaha and Kansas 
City (for example) and kept a list of such names 
for use on election day. 

On election day, the election "judges" — 
appointed, to guard the ballot-boxes, by the same 
men who lowered the assessments and rebated the 
taxes of the corporations — were given the lists of 
"phony" names registered in their precincts; and 
the judges would check off the fraudulent names 
on their poll books, and for each name deposit 
a ballot in the ballot box in support of the System! 
Could anything be simpler? Certainly nothing 
of the sort was ever more barefaced. I have 
seen typewritten lists of these "phony" names 
that were made out at the Democratic Club and 



THE BEAST AND THE BALLOT 159 

furnished to the Democratic workers, so that no 
election judge might make the mistake of deposit- 
ing a ballot for any voter who might later 
appear at the polls to vote for himself. 

One day one of the county clerks of this period 
came to my chambers and said: "Ben, I don't 
know what I'm going to do about the lists of names 
that are coming in from the lower wards. They 
are bringing in thousand of names that I know 
are false." I advised him to refuse the names 
and expose the fraud. He did not do it. He 
has told me, since, that he tried to stand out, 
but the organization forced him to give way. 
He got his reward! 

Long afterward, Mr. "Jim" Williams, a polit- 
ical henchman of Wm. G. Evans, president 
of the tramway company, confessed to me: 
"Judge, it's really a shame when the thing gets 
as raw as it was that year. Why, one night, before 
that election, I carried $20,000 down to the Demo- 
cratic Club and I sat there around a table with 
Bill Davoren and Tom Phillips, with a bottle 
of whiskey between them, and dickered about how 
much we ought to pay per majority per precinct!" 
And observe that the henchman of Evans, then 
"Republican" boss, supplies the Democratic ward 
healers with the money necessary to obtain frau- 
dulent majorities for the "Democratic" ticket. 
(The Beast is bi-partisan !) 

The result was that in one of the precincts of 



160 THE BEAST 

a ward of which " Billy" Green* was the "leader," 
the election returns showed 717 votes for the 
straight Democratic ticket and 9 votes for its 
opponents. The precinct, as everybody knew, 
did not have more than perhaps a hundred legal 
voters. And on one election night, when the returns 
were being announced, I stood outside a news- 
paper office and saw such returns, from "Billy" 
Green's ward, received by the crowd with shouts 
of laughter. A heart- tickling joke! And the 
people who applauded it were being plundered 
of the money that bought this laughable ma- 
jority! 

Did these people know it? Certainly not. 
They did not see the cat. I did not see it myself 
in this matter in those days. I thought the little 
"bosses," like Frank Adams of the Police Board, 
were alone responsible for the election frauds; 
and when the Honest Election League was formed 
and I was invited by the League to address mass 
meetings, I attacked the little "bosses" and the 
successors of the County Commissioners, and 
"bawled them out" amid the hisses and threats 
of their friends — threats that were made with 
the clenched fist brandished in my face. It was 
exciting work, but it was wasted. The Beast 
must have grinned like a Cheshire cat as it lis- 
tened to me. 

The other speakers of the League — with the one 

*Green is now a city detective in Denver. 



THE BEAST AND THE BALLOT 161 

exception of Father Wm. O'Ryan — blamed the 
mere tools who stuffed the ballot boxes, an associ- 
ation of Democratic ward-heelers called "the 
Savages." They blamed the Savages as the 
good citizen of New York blames Tammany 
Hall. I knew a number of these Savages well; 
I had worked with them in the ranks of the 
Democratic party; and I knew that they had been 
corrupted by the political conditions, and that 
they had in them qualities of daring loyalty 
and unselfishness of which their employers had 
no trace. They would have followed honest 
leaders as unflinchingly as they followed these 
corrupt ones. 

And the corrupt ones were not only corrupt; 
they were so greedily selfish that they had not 
even the human loyalty for the Savages that 
the poor Savages had for them. Note what 
they did: 

In the spring and fall of 1903 were held the 
"charter elections" in Denver, by which the 
city and county of Denver were to be given a 
new instrument of consolidation; and under this 
charter the powers of the utility corporations 
were to be largely limited and the rights of the 
people protected. The corporations, through the 
agency of the Democratic machine, defeated the 
charter drawn up by the honest-charter conven- 
tion, elected a convention that was more to their 
taste and obtained a charter that gave them 



162 THE BEAST 

more power than ever. In this campaign the 
election frauds were most open. "What chance 
have youse people got?" one of the Savages 
asked me. "Boss Evans and his crowd has fel- 
lows like me, good for 500 votes in a precinct, 
when fellows like you is only good for one vote. 
What show have youse got?" A watcher for 
the Honest Election League was thrown out of 
a polling booth by the Savages, and when an 
attorney for the League threatened the election 
judge with arrest and a sentence in jail, the bal- 
lot-box stuff er replied: "I don't care a damn 
for your district court. We'll take it to the 
Supreme Court, and then you'll see what hap- 
pens." As a matter of fact, the League prose- 
cuted in the district court but the case was 
appealed to the Supreme Court and the ballot- 
box stuff er won. 

Similarly, in the elections of the spring of 
1904, the utility corporations used the Demo- 
cratic machine and the Savages to elect our old 
friend Robert W. Speer mayor of Denver, along 
with a Democratic ticket; and, according to the 
confessions of the agents of corruption them- 
selves, there were 10,000 fraudulent votes counted 
at the polls. But six months later, in the fall of 
this same year 1904, the corporations for their 
own purposes wished to elect a Republican ticket 
in the city and the state; and the Democratic 
Savages were warned by their leaders — par- 



THE BEAST AND THE BALLOT 163 

ticularly by the mayor, Robert W. Speer — 
that they must not stuff the ballot boxes. They 
did not obey the voice of their master. They 
did, for themselves, what they had so often done 
for the corporations — although the frauds were 
not as great as usual — and they succeeded in 
electing the Democratic ticket in the city. Court 
proceedings were at once begun against them, 
and by an unprecedented use of the Supreme 
Court they were sent to jail. I went to them 
there and sat in their cells and talked with them. 
Their indignation was almost tearful. They 
were like a family of "bad" boys who had 
been taught by their father to steal for him and 
had been handed over to the police by their unna- 
tural parent when they stole for themselves! 
And the blind public rejoiced in their punish- 
ment and degradation! And the Supreme Court 
handed over to the corporations the "swag" 
which the young thieves had tried to keep for 
themselves ! 

This, however, is by the way and in advance 
of my story. The point I wish to make is merely 
that I knew the ballot boxes were being stuffed 
and knew how successfully it could be done. 
I knew too that in my previous campaign the 
Democratic machine had used frauds in an 
attempt to defeat me. One of the Savages had 
confessed to me that in his district, when the 
ballots were being counted, hundreds of straight 



164 THE BEAST 

Democratic votes had been "scratched" against 
me by the Democratic election judges who marked 
a cross against the name of my Republican oppo- 
nent. If that had been done when I was a com- 
paratively inoffensive opponent of the System, 
what would they not do now, after my four years 
of "grand-stand" plays and exposures? I knew 
what they would do. They would put me on 
the Democratic ticket — because they wished 
to use popularity of the Juvenile Court in support 
of the ticket — and then would "scratch" and 
"stuff" to defeat me. Their nomination was 
the gift they offered me; and it was the gift I 
feared. 

I decided that I would not accept their nomi- 
nation alone. The Juvenile Court had been 
helped by citizens of all political parties, and 
there was no reason why I should make a par- 
tisan campaign for re-election. Moreover, the 
Republican organization had been deserted by 
the public utility corporations, for the time, and a 
number of young reformers had seized it and 
hauled down the skull-and-cross-bones. Several 
were old and close friends w horn I had known since 
my schooldays. All were favourable to my candi- 
dacy; and, though I did not believe I could be 
elected on the Republican ticket alone, I knew 
I could be nominated on it. I was even offered 
the Republican nomination for the mayoralty, 
privately, by Mr. John W. Springer, and Mr. 



THE BEAST AND THE BALLOT 165 

Greeley W. Whitford, in the office of the Conti- 
nental Trust Company, before Mr. Springer had 
accepted that nomination himself; and I refused 
it because my work was in the Juvenile Court 
and I did not wish to abandon that. But Mr. 
Springer was fighting Evans; and I agreed that 
if the Republicans endorsed my candidacy for 
the judgeship I should accept their support, so 
that the popularity of the Juvenile Court might 
not be wholly an asset of the Evans Democratic 
ticket. 

I made my decision known to my friends, and 
immediately I received an anxious visit from Harry 
A. Lindsley, the District Attorney who served 
the Beast so faithfully while he was in office. 
He took me out to luncheon, and for two hours 
he laboured with me eloquently over the restau- 
rant dishes. The registration, he assured me, 
had been fixed for the Democratic party to win, 
and if I did not agree to take the Democratic 
nomination, and refuse any other, I would go 
down to defeat inevitably. Worse than that: 
once out of the Juvenile Court, I would find 
that I could not make a living in Denver with 
the insulted Powers against me. "You'll not 
be able to make a hundred dollars a month," 
he said. He named lawyers who, as I knew, 
had failed in Denver because they had fought 
the System; they had been unable to get any big 
cases to handle, because the corporations would 



166 THE BEAST 

give them none; and they had been unable to win 
even their little cases, because the corporation 
judges were against them. He painted a vivid 
picture of me, shabby, soured, and a failure in 
life; and I knew, from my own observation, 
that the picture was not overdrawn. Some of 
the most honest and promising young men in 
Denver have been driven from us in just such a 
state of crestfallen destitution. 

However, I knew all this before Lindsley told 
it to me, and the scarecrow had lost its terrors. 
I told him I would not refuse the support of any 
party. My court was non-partisan and I pro- 
posed to make its judge the same. 

Next came a visit in my chambers from Earl 
Hewitt,* a "fixer" and "man-Friday" of Robert 
W. Speer: and after he had shut and locked my 
door, he drew from his pocket — so to speak — 
a gold brick of a peculiarly winning glitter. If 
I would promise to accept a Democratic nomi- 
nation for the judgeship and refuse the Republican 
nomination, and support Speer for the mayoralty, 
the Democrats would elect me Governor of Colo- 
rado in the fall! I must have looked dubious 
(though I tried not to) for he used all the elo- 
quence of a horse trader in order to persuade 
me. He succeeded in convincing me that the 
trap was set and sure, since the bait was so large 
and alluring. And after he had gone I wrote a 

*Hewitt is now a member of the Fire and Police Board in Denver. 



THE BEAST AND THE BALLOT 167 

letter to the newspapers refusing to bind myself 
to the Democratic party and announcing myself 
as a non-partisan candidate for re-election to a 
non-partisan court. 

"You have signed your political death war- 
rant/' a friend assured me; and I believed that 
he was right. A friendly ex- governor had written 
me a letter to the same effect. Milton Smith 
and "Bill" Davoren and all the other agents of 
the Beast saw my "finish." I saw it myself. 
But I was resolved to meet it on my feet and 
fighting. 

The women rallied first. Mrs J. B. Belford, 
Mrs. Sarah Piatt Decker and Mrs M. A. B. 
Conine of the Woman's Club, organized indigna- 
tion meetings, protesting against the opposition 
of the Democratic machine to my renomination ; 
and the newspapers spread reports of the pro- 
test, written effectively by such able newspaper 
women as "Polly Pry" and Winifred Black and 
Ellis Meredith. The pulpits took it up. The 
newsboys began to parade the streets shouting: 

"Who, which, when? 
Wish we were men, 
So we could vote for our little Ben." 

(And for the first time in my life I found it an 
advantage to be "five-foot-six" and weigh ninety- 
eight pounds!) The Democratic leaders began 
to fear th#t if the Republicans nominated me and 
the Democrats did not, the women would vote 



168 THE BEAST 

the straight Republican ticket, in their blind 
resentment, and turn the whole election. The 
children marched and countermarched with songs 
and banners, and even mobbed the doors of the 
Democratic Club with insults and cat-calls. 

"Little ," a Democratic "leader," said, 

"They're stirring up the whole town!" A pro- 
fessional politician is as cowardly as a gambler 
is superstitious. When the Democratic conven- 
tion met, I did not attend but I was nominated. 

I was nominated — but not for love. A Demo- 
cratic candidate, named Robert J. Byrne, went 
to one of the young Republican "leaders" and 
said: "We had to nominate Lindsey because 
we thought you people were going to. But if 
you'll put up a Republican, we'll support him 
and bury Lindsey so deep he'll never be heard 
of again." Other Democrats made the same 
proposal to other Republicans. And we felt it 
necessary to hold a mass meeting, to give the 
reform Republicans the moral support of some 
public enthusiasm. We met in the opera house, 
under the auspices of the leading women of Den- 
ver; and Father Wm. O'Ryan, Rabbi Wm. S. 
Friedman and Rev. John H. Houghton spoke in 
behalf of my candidacy. In the midst of the 
enthusiasm the news was brought that the Repub- 
licans had nominated me; and we adjourned 
with cheers. 

My election was assured. There was no doubt 



THE BEAST AND THE BALLOT 169 

of it. It was impossible to defeat me. But I 
knew another fact that was equally assured, 
namely, that my election would be declared void 
by the courts. I did not join in the cheering. 
You see, those elections were held under the 
new charter consolidating the city and county of 
Denver. The charter provided for the election 
of two county judges; but the constitutional 
amendment that had provided for a convention 
to draw r up the charter, had particularly prohib- 
ited the convention from providing for the elec- 
tion of such judges. These judges should have 
been elected under the state statutes, as they had 
been previously. The charter convention knew 
it. I knew it, and I had written to members of 
the convention about it. But the System had seen 
an opportunity to get rid of me. "Let's mix it 
up," I was told that one of the Democratic bosses 
had said. "We'll see if we can't drop the little 
devil in the shuffle." If I were elected and my 
election declared void, the County Commission- 
ers, under the law, w r ould have the right to name 
a judge to take my place; but there was nothing 
for me to do but go ahead with them and try to 
provide that after the "shuffle" they should find 
me on top! 



CHAPTER X 

THE BEAST AND THE BALLOT (CONTINUED) 

ANEW England philosopher has said that 
the great virtue of a college education is 
to teach a man how unavailing it is. I have never 
been taught that. I have always had an envy of 
those men who have been able to live four years 
of their youth among the ideals of a university, 
protected from the disillusionments of the world, 
novitiates of culture and the liberal mind, happy 
among the boyish comradeships of the lecture 
room and campus. It had always seemed to me 
that my life had been spiritually orphaned by 
this loss of an alma mater. And when — just 
after my re-election in the spring of 1904 — the 
Denver University, through its chancellor, the 
Reverend Henry Augustus Buchtel, offered to 
confer an honorary degree upon me, I felt as 
humbly flattered as if I were a quondam street 
waif whom some almost noble family now wished 
to adopt. (Intellectual snobbery ? No doubt of it !) 
On the night that my degree was to be conferred 
upon me I went proudly to the Commencement 
exercises in the Trinity Methodist Church. Mr. 
W. G. Evans, president of the tramway company, 

170 



THE BEAST AND THE BALLOT 171 

had been showing a new interest in the Juvenile 
Court and had sent me word, through a friend, 
that he thought my work for the children ought 
to be publicly recognized by the university. I 
knew that the university had been founded by 
Mr. Evans's father, and that Mr. Evans himself 
had assisted it with large and frequent contribu- 
tions. I knew that Dean Shattuck of the univer- 
sity had been a household friend of Mr. Evans 
and his family, that he had been elected a mem- 
ber of the charter convention that betrayed the 
city to the corporations, and that he had not 
opposed the betrayal. But all this meant nothing 
to me. The college had remained in my thought 
something as unworldly as a convent. The 
Honourable Henry M. Teller was to receive an 
honorary degree with me; and there was nothing 
but pride in my heart as I walked up the aisle 
of Trinity Church, with Senator Teller and 
Chancellor Buchtel, to the raised platform on 
which I was to receive my patent of intellectual 
nobility. 

The church, of course, was crowded — crowded 
with the young men and women of the college and 
their fond parents. I looked at them from the 
platform and saw their happiness, and knew — 
better than they did — their good fortune, and 
thought of the little waifs of our Juvenile Court, 
and was glad that here, at least, youth was what 
it ought to be. They looked up at me, and I 



172 THE BEAST 

was proud to be there, honoured among them and 
raised in their innocent estimation by an aca- 
demic distinction. The chancellor, in his address, 
was eloquent in his praise of our court; he made 
me blush till I could scarcely see. "If Christ 
came to Denver/' he said, "He would go straight 
to your court; for there you are doing the Mas- 
ter's work/' He put my precious diploma in my 
hand, and I sat down with tears in my eyes, amid 
the generous applause of all those enviable young 
people. I felt that I had never been happier, 
never been more fortunate, never been more 
honoured — and never could be. 

While I was still blinking, in a flattered daze, 
a message was brought to me from Milton Smith 
written on a calling card; he wished to see me 
after the meeting, on a matter of great import- 
ance; and I came back to earth and politics with 
a chill shock. He was the chairman of the Demo- 
cratic State Central Committee. It was he, you 
remember, who carried the case of Cronin, the 
dive keeper, to the Supreme Court in Washing- 
ton. He was attorney for the telephone company 
and its associated corporations. I wished him 
at the ends of the earth. 

I suspected what he wished to see me about. 
The Democrats, with the assistance of Wm. G. 
Evans, the Republican Boss, had elected Demo- 
cratic Boss Speer and his ticket; but the elec- 
tion frauds had been so gross and palpable that 



THE BEAST AND THE BALLOT 173 

the Republicans and their mayoralty candidate, 
Mr. John W. Springer, had filed suit in my court, 
contesting the election. The matter was to come 
up, on the morrow, on a motion to appoint watch- 
ers for the sealed ballot boxes. I guessed that 
Milton Smith wished to see me about this. I 
wondered, for a moment, what he could have to 
say to me; and then my eyes returned to the 
young graduates who were receiving their degrees 
at the threshold of their college, 'with their faces 
to the unknown world out of which I had been 
momentarily uplifted; and I forgot Cronin's 
attorney in the spectacle of hope and youthful 
innocence beginning its career, like a bride turn- 
ing from the alter — on the arm of an old rake ! 
Would she reform him? I wondered. 

Milton Smith was waiting for me, with a young 
man whom I shall leave nameless (because he 
was, I believe, a guiltless participant in what fol- 
lowed). They were waiting for me with a closed 
cab; for a thunderstorm had broken over the city 
and the rain was coming down as if the skies had 
burst. They invited Senator Teller and his wife 
into the carriage, and we drove first to Teller's 
home — a few blocks away — and nothing 
passed between us but congratulations on our 
academic honours and condemnations of the 
weather that had made such a sodden ending 
for the young people's Commencement. 

But when the Tellers had left us — and I sat 



174 THE BEAST 

back with my precious degree buttoned up in my 
breast pocket — Smith suddenly began: "Ben, 
we thought you wouldn't care to try those elec- 
tion cases." "Why?" I said, surprised. "Well 
now," he replied, "Iil tell you. You ran for 
election yourself, didn't you?" "I ran," I an- 
swered, "on both tickets." "Yes," he said, "but 
we don't want to embarrass you. There's no need 
for you to take the responsibility of deciding about 
elections in which you ran yourself. We feel 
that everybody would be better satisfied if you 
called in an outside judge." I asked: "Who, 
for instance?" He named a judge who has since 
become a notorious party crook. 

The thunder was battering down the heavens 
overhead, with flashes of lightning and torrents 
of rain. The carriage splashed and jolted through 
the intermittent darkness. Milton Smith insinu- 
ated his way persuasively into his proposition 
that I should "job" the election cases for Boss 
Evans and his Democratic agents; and I won- 
dered whether there was any mark of the Beast 
on the diploma that I had been so absurdly proud 
of a half-hour before. 

They did not doubt my honesty, he said, but 
they were afraid that I was prejudiced, perhaps. 
I had been addressing mass meetings on the sub- 
ject of ballot-box frauds; I had been a good deal 
wrought up, it seemed; I might not be as impar- 
tial as I ought to be. Besides, I ought to know 



THE BEAST AND THE BALLOT 175 

what election cases were: both sides generally 
were equally guilty, and a judge was expected 
to stay with his party. They were afraid that I 
was squeamish. If I granted the Republicans 
this right to appoint "watchers" over the sealed 
boxes I would be giving the ballots into the 
hands of the enemy; at least, that was what 
they feared. 

I confess I was curious to know how far he 
would go in this attempt to persuade a judge to 
decide a case before it came to court. He did 
not go very far. Under my assurances that I 
would not shirk my responsibility, that I was not 
prejudiced, that I would give him a square deal, 
he lost his temper; and pounding his fist into his 
hand he declared they would get a change of 
venue, and to get it, they would file affidavits 
that would make my "ears ring." This threat 
spoiled the whole situation, as far as I was con- 
cerned. I looked out the window to see how 
near home I was, and a flash of lightning showed 
me headed for the City Park — which was no 
neighbour of mine. "Here," I said, "where 
are we going? Take me home." 

It seemed that they had mistaken my address. 
Smith calmed down. The cab lurched around 
in the darkness; and the rest of the conversation 
was in a descending scale of irritation. We 
drew up, at last, at my door, and there we stayed 
talking uselessly, until, finally, I said: "Well, 



176 THE BEAST 

it's for you to determine the propriety of this busi- 
ness. All I have to say is that I intend to hear 
the case. Produce your affidavits, and if they 
convince me I'll give you a change of venue. 
But I don't intend to shirk my responsibility. 
I was non-partisan in my election, and I'll be 
non-partisan on the bench." 

I got out. The door was slammed angrily 
behind me; and the carriage drove off. The 
rain had ceased. I went slowly into the house 
with my honorary "Bill-Evans" degree. 

I have often wondered whether any of the 
younger participants in those Commencement exer- 
cises found as little gilt on their gingerbread as I 
did when I got home with mine out of that storm. 
Or is it only I who so often find the honorary 
bouquets of the world a bunch of thistles when 
I close my flattered hands on them? I hope so. 
Well 

The case came before me next morning, but 
neither side was ready to argue. Both asked a 
continuance, and I granted it. I was leaving 
town, that night, on a long trip to Portland, 
Maine, where I was to speak to a charities con- 
vention about our Juvenile Court work; and I 
arranged that Judge Frost should hear the pre- 
liminary motions in the election case during my 
absence, but keep the case itself till I returned. 
I had begun to suspect that the System had 
trapped itself in those sealed ballot boxes, and I 



THE BEAST AND THE BALLOT 177 

wished to be at hand with a judicial club when 
they were opened. 

That evening, w T hen I was packing my valise 
before I left my home to catch my train, I had a 
caller — a visitor from the past — my old part- 
ner in law, Senator Gardener. He was fatter; 
he looked more cynical and prosperous, but he 
was the man with whom I had first been under 
fire in politics, and I was glad to see him. We 
talked of old times, as old friends do. We talked 
of our present, and I did not resent his compla- 
cent boast of a financial success that must have 
contrasted in his mind with my own circumstances. 
(I knew him too well to resent it; I knew that to 
him I was still the same impractical simpleton I 
had always been.) 

We finally came down to the last elections 
and the case that was before my court. He said 
that he had been talking to Mr. Evans and to 
"Bob" Speer; in fact, Mr. Speer had been to his 
office to see him. He had been told that Chas. 
J. Hughes, Jr., was to appear before me in my 
court and argue that I had no jurisdiction. "I'm 
to appear too," he said. "You see, I'm a 
Republican and Hughes is a Democrat, so the 
thing will be non-partisan. Hughes has an 
argument that'll convince any one. It'll let you 
out. You needn't hear the case at all. And 
you know your election as County Judge is no 
good; and if you had to decide this case against 



178 THE BEAST 

the Democrats, you could never get another nom* 
{nation." 

This sounded plausible — all but. There was 
one point I wished explained : why did Mr. Evans 
feel that Chas. J. Hughes, the corporation light 
of the Colorado bar, needed the support of such 
a lesser luminary as Gardener in the argument? 

I said: "The statute of the state says that my 
court shall have jurisdiction in such cases, and 
the city charter expressly declares so. But if 
they have any law that will convince me to 
the contrary, you know well enough I'll do my 
duty." 

He did not seem satisfied. "To be frank 
with you," he explained, "they have never quite 
understood you, Ben. They're afraid you're not 
just right — that they'll not get a square deal. 
All they want is a square deal." (They have 
their own idea of "a square deal.") 

"You can tell them," I assured him, "that 
they will receive absolute justice. I can't say 
more than that, can I?" 

He fidgeted in his chair like a bad boy who is 
about to "snitch." I waited. " Well," he hinted, 
"they want to employ me in the case." 

I saw it coming. "I'll be mighty glad, for 
your sake," I assured him, "to see you in it." 

He looked up with a half-sickly smile. "Ben," 
he said, "you know I don't want to do anything 
wrong." (Surely not!) "But you and I have 



THE BEAST AND THE BALLOT 179 

always been friends, and you know what poli- 
tics are. One side's just as bad as the other, 
and you know it." He hesitated. "Besides, if 
you do go ahead and try to hear the case, the 
Supreme Court will enjoin you." 

"That's for the Supreme Court to decide," I 
said — and w r aited for him to come back to the 
secret that had stuck in his throat. 

He talked around it for a long time. If I did 
open the ballot boxes, he said, I could put half 
the Democrats in town in jail, but it would not 
be enough to change the results of the election. 
It would do no good. He believed in taking a 
practical view of the case. I could resolve the 
reasonable doubts, in the matter, in favour of my 
own party. If I did not, I could never get another 
nomination. 

"Well," I said, "you've been out on the Repub- 
lican platform attacking the Democratic frauds. 
And now here you are defending them!" 

He turned red. "It's all damn politics. They 
said they would pay me a big fee." He looked 
at me with a dubious expression of guilt and 
pleading shamefacedness. "It'll be the biggest 
fee I ever got in my life. And you know I'll be 
square with you." This last was given w r ith an 
insinuating slowness. 

I remained dense. "I have no objection to 
seeing you in the case, I don't see what that has 
to do with it." 



180 THE BEAST 

"Well," he said, "unless I can guarantee that 
you'll dismiss the case, they'll not employ me." 

I do not know whether they had expected me 
to ask how much of the fee I was to receive; or 
whether it was supposed that because of my old 
friendship with Gardener I would help him earn 
the money! 

I looked into his face, as I try to look into the 
faces of the "bad" boys who come to my court. 
"Don't you see," I said, "that these fellows are 
either trying to trap me, or trying to make me dis- 
grace my calling — and they're just using you ? 
Why do you let them do it? You know they 
sent you here with this message." He rose from 
his chair, looking ugly and mean. "/ know it," 
I said. "Why do you play cat's-paw in such a 
game?" 

He looked about him for his hat, scowling. I 
saw that it was useless to talk to him. "Well," 
I said, "you can go back to them, then, and tell 
them this case will be tried fairly and justly. I 
have done nothing to make them think I'm 'not 
right.' Their own conduct is the cause of that 
suspicion." 

He stopped at the door. He asked, guiltily: 
"Can't you get me out of here without any one 
seeing me?" 

There was only one way out, and that was 
through the front door. He took it — and he left 
behind him the last faint sense of our old friend- 



THE BEAST AND THE BALLOT 181 

ship. It was he who soon after introduced in 
the Senate a bill forbidding the Judge of the County 
Court to leave Denver, except in the month of 
July, under a penalty of forfeiting fifteen dollars 
a day during his absence; and it was he who 
introduced another bill, at the same time, for- 
bidding the County Judge to call in an outside 
judge to assist him with the legitimate work of a 
crowded docket. At that time our court was 
doing 60 per cent, more work than the four 
judges of the district court, combined; and I 
was doing it practically alone. We had held 104 
night sessions in one year. We were turning 
into the county nearly ten thousand dollars a 
year from litigants after all our salaries and 
expenses had been paid. (And this was one of 
the complaints the politicians had against us. 
We should have used the surplus to provide "jobs 
for the boys," as the other courts did.) Instead 
of taking the holidays allowed judges by custom, 
I had spent my spare time lecturing, in various 
states, in support of juvenile- court laws and the 
work of the Juvenile Improvement Association, 
which, as a children's protective and betterment 
league, was becoming a national organization. 
President Roosevelt had only just recommended 
our laws to the District of Columbia, and I had 
personally induced many governors in many 
states to do the same thing. However, this attempt 
of the "interests "to hamper me in a work that was 



182 THE BEAST 

being approved all over the country, is out of its 
order of consideration here. The fight against 
Senator Gardener's "spite bills " did not begin 
till some time later, and I shall save the story of it 
for its proper place. 

Meanwhile, I went on my trip to Maine. The 
Supreme Court granted the predicted writ of pro- 
hibition temporarily enjoining the County Court 
from trying the cases, and before this writ was 
made permanent something else happened. Our 
old friend Boss Graham, of the Republican 
machine, went to Mr. John W. Springer, the 
Republican candidate for the mayoralty (who 
was protesting the election of Speer, the corpora- 
tion Democrat), and told Springer that if his pro- 
test was not dropped and his case in my court 
withdrawn he would be ruined. He and his 
trust company would have "the four utility cor- 
porations of the city to whip financially. " Gra- 
ham claimed that the threat came from Evans. 
Mr. Springer said publicly: "I conferred with 
the others interested in pushing the cases and 
said: 'Boys, we had better quit before we begin. 
We haven't enough money to beat four utility 
corporations.' " The tools of the Beast had first 
threatened him with the ruin of his reputation; 
they had showed him "fake" photographs of 
himself in company with various indecencies; 
and he had replied that he "would clean them 
out with a gun" if they attempted any such 



THE BEAST AND THE BALLOT 183 

vilification. Some offensive articles about him 
were printed in a corporation paper of special 
circulation*; and an attempt was made to get 
copies of a' scurrilous pamphlet delivered to Mrs. 
Springer who lay fatally ill at the time. (Oh, 
the Beast has no compunction!) Mr. Springer 
was not intimidated. "But/' he said, "I could 
not fight them on the other issue. I could not 
jeopardize the savings of the widows and orphans 
that were invested in our trust company. They 
had me there. And they knew it." 

Of course they knew it. Widows and orphans 
were nothing to them. They live by making 
widows and defrauding orphans. It is part of 
the profits of the System. (It is cheaper to make 
a wife a widow than to pay her husband a living 
wage, or protect him at his dangerous work!) 
Mr. Springer had some human feeling of social 
responsibility. The others have nothing but the 
animal cruelty of the preying Beast in their hearts 
when they are on the hunt. (Mr. Walter S. 

♦ Perry Clay's Review. Perry A. Clay, its proprietor, is a man whom 
I saw among the armed gamblers on the steps of the City Hall, defending 
the corrupt Fire and Police Board from Governor Waite's militia. He 
turned up again among the Negro deputies who precipitated the election 
riots in 1900, and he was undersheriff to the Democratic Sheriff who sold 
the use of his office for $20,000 to the Republicans during that campaign. 
Clay has since been politically rewarded with the clerkship of the Dis- 
trict Court. His Review, long supported by the advertisements of 
saloons, dives and brothels, is now disguised as a temperance advocate; 
and in this disguise, delivered free, from door to door, whenever the Beast 
needs aid, it carries the arguments of the corporations to the homes of "the 
church element." B. B. L. 



:84 THE BEAST 

Cheesman, president of the water company, 
afterward told a well-known banker: "It cost 
us more to defeat Springer than any other man 
who ever ran for office in Denver!'''; 

Mr. Springer withdrew his protest on condition 
that the Evans candidates should pay the court 
costs thus far incurred. This was agreed to. 
Mr. Evans saw that the money was deposited to 
the credit of the Republican chairman; and 
$1,000 of the sum came from Chase — Ed. Chase! 
Do you understand? He was, and is, one of the 
"leaders'' of the gambling syndicate in Denver. 
There you have the Beast scratching its right 
ear with its left hind leg — so to speak. Evans 
and Chase! 

And do not for a moment imagine that this 
unholy alliance of Evans and Chase is peculiar 
to Denver. You will find it in every American 
city in which the heads of public utility cor- 
porations and the other "captains of industry'' 
are trying to obtain special privileges to steal 
from the people. The Evans of your city — 
whichever one it is — is a partner with your 
Chase, your Cronin, your Tammany "Savages," 
your Frank Adams, your Billy Adams and all 
your enemies of law, promoters of graft and buz- 
zards of public loot. Chancellor Buchtel is only 
the Chancellor Day of Denver. The Beast is 
everywhere the Beast, and its agents are always 
its agents. 



CHAPTER XI 

THE BEAST AT BAY 

THE elections that followed, in the autumn 
of 1904, were marked by the most lawless 
and far-reaching contrivances of power on the 
part of the corporations in Colorado. In that huge 
turmoil of injustice, of subsidized treason and legal 
anarchy, my own small struggle was the merest 
flurry. But I am not trying to compose a history 
of the gigantic activities of the plutocracy, out of 
the conflicting testimony of various witnesses and 
the disputable interpretation of incidents of which 
there may be more than one sense. I am only 
seeking to make plain to you what I saw with my 
own eyes — to put before you the evidence of a 
personal experience of which there can be no 
doubt — to show you clearly, in the little, what 
was actually going on in the large. 

My election had been declared invalid, as I 
had known it would be; and it became necessary 
for me to run again. The corporations, having 
put their Democratic tools in power in the city 
elections of the spring, now bought back the 
Republican machine so as to elect a corporation 
Legislature and governor in the state elections of 

185 



186 THE BEAST 

the fall. I expected, therefore, to have the Repub- 
licans against me, and we began to organize the 
usual committees and arrange for the usual public 
meetings in advance. But several days before 
the Republican convention was to meet, a number 
of Republican "leaders/' in newspaper inter- 
views, announced that there would be no oppo- 
sition to my nomination on the Republican ticket; 
and Mr. "Jim" Williams, one of the most inti- 
mate of Wm. G. Evans's personal agents, invited 
me to meet him in a room in the Brown Palace 
Hotel and assured me that it would not be neces- 
sary to "organize" my friends. "There seems 
to be no use trying to fight you," he said with a 
smile, "and we have decided to nominate you 
when the convention meets next week." 

I felt relieved. The spring campaign had been 
a nervous trial that I did not wish to repeat. I 
thanked Williams for saving me the anxiety of 
several days' uncertainty, and went back to my 
court w^ork. 

Some days later I spoke to a Republican friend 
about the interview with Williams, and he said: 
"That's strange. Jim has been quietly sending 
the word 'down the line' that the party caucus is 
to put young Bert Shattuck (Hubert L. Shattuck)* 
on the slate, to-night, for County Judge." I 
thought my friend was misinformed. The Den- 
ver Republican, the official organ of the party, 

♦Shattuck is now (Jan., 1910) a District Judge in Denver. 



THE BEAST AT BAY 187 

had been proclaiming in large headlines and 
leaded type that I was to be nominated unani- 
mously on the party ticket. Bert Shattuck's 
father, the former Dean of the Denver University, 
had publicly declared that I ought to have the 
position of County and Juvenile Court judge for 
life; and he had come smilingly to my chambers 
and promised me his loyal support. His son had 
been Clerk of the County Court when I first took 
office, and we had never been anything but 
friendly. It seemed to me impossible that my 
Republican informant could be right. 

The night on which the Republican caucus 
met, to make up a slate for the convention, I made 
no attempt to find out what was being done; but 
at midnight I was roused from bed to answer 
an urgent call on the telephone, and a friend an- 
nounced: "The Republicans have selected Shat- 
tuck for County Judge. Evans sent a telegram 
from New York saying it had to be done. The cor- 
porations are against you. They're going to prevent 
you from getting a nomination on either ticket." 

I dressed in haste and hurried down to the 
office of the News — which paper, like the Den- 
ver Post, was then friendly to me — and a special 
edition was rushed to the presses with a flaming 
exposure of "Treachery" on the front page. In 
the early morning I went to the editor of the Post 
and a special edition was issued by that paper 
too. But the Republican — the paper that had 



188 THE BEAST 

been promising my unopposed nomination by 
the Republican party — inserted only an incon- 
spicuous five-line paragraph announcing that 
Shattuck had been selected by the caucus ! 

We had been prettily betrayed. There was 
no time now to arouse the public sentiment that, 
at the previous election, had "scared the wits out 
of the Boss," as the Post had said. There was 
no time to organize the women and children. 
We had just twelve hours in which to prepare, 
before the Republican convention should meet to 
ratify the choice of the caucus; and it might as 
well have been twelve minutes. The Demo- 
cratic machine was against me. Mayor Speer, 
it was reported in the newspapers, "on the very 
best authority," had obtained the promise from 
Evans that I should not be nominated. "Chair- 
man Davoren, for the Democrats, smiled pleasantly 
when these matters were being discussed." I 
had been "effectually blocked." Opposed by 
both parties, with both machines using election 
frauds and corporation contributions against me, 
I could have no more hope of winning my way 
back to the county court on an independent 
ticket than of getting an election to the White 
House itself. 

Some of the young Republican reformers who 
had nominated me in the spring campaign came 
to my chambers, that morning, and talked the 
situation over with me. They suggested that I 



THE BEAST AT BAY 189 

should appeal to Mr. David H. Moffat, who was 
president of the First National Bank of Denver 
and a large stockholder in the utility corpora- 
tions. But I did not know Mr. Moffat. The only 
man of the sort whom I knew was Mr. Walter S. 
Cheesman, president of the Denver Union Water 
Company and head of our Society for the Pre- 
vention of Cruelty to Children. "Then see 
Cheesman/' they advised. 

I knew Mr. Cheesman well. I had first gone 
to him to get his aid in obtaining the public baths 
and playgrounds for the children, and he had been 
helping us in our work for the children ever since. 
I had more than once accompanied him, in his 
automobile, on little jaunts around Denver; and 
once, on our way to inspect the waterworks dam, 
which his company was building outside Denver, 
I saw him stop his car, pick up a stray cat mew- 
ing by the roadside, and take it to the dam where 
we caught fish to feed it. I thought him a gentle 
and compassionate man of wealth — and I hur- 
ried, now, to his office to appeal to his philan- 
thropy, to his interest in our court work, and 
above all to his influence with Mr. Evans and his 
power on the corporation boards. 

I went to the offices of the Denver Union Water 
Company, and was ushered down the inner pas- 
sageways, past clerks and secretaries, to Mr. 
Cheesman's private room. He was seated at 
his mahogany writing desk, a typical business 



190 THE BEAST 

man in his business clothes — bald, elderly, with 
a round and kindly face but shrewd, cold eyes. 
He received me genially enough. "Mr. Chees- 
man," I said, at once, "I've come to see you about 
the convention." 

"Yes, yes, Judge," he said; "sit down." I 
sat down. He always spoke in a sort of half 
voice, that at times became a whisper, leaning 
forward, as if confidentially, because his hear- 
ing was defective. "Yes, I've just been talking 
to Mr. Field about it over the telephone." Mr. 
Field, of course, was Mr. E. B. Field, president 
of the telephone company. 

Thus encouraged, I went on to explain my situ- 
ation. I told him that I had made a lot of ene- 
mies among the Democrats because I had exposed 
the grafting County Commissioners and attacked 
the Police Board for protecting the wine rooms 
and denounced the ballot-box stuffing that had 
been done by the Democratic machine. I could 
not hope for the Democratic nomination, but I 
had been led to expect a place on the Republican 
ticket. Now I had been betrayed by the Repub- 
lican caucus. "It's not square," I said. "It's 
not honest. It's not fair." 

He listened, but I saw that he listened unmoved. 

Then I appealed to his interest in the work we 
had done for the children. He heard me politely, 
but with a blank eye. "You know," I pleaded, 
"that I'm entitled to a renomination on every 



THE BEAST AT BAY 191 

count. The court has been honest; it's been 
efficient; it has served the public interest every 
time. The people will elect me; you know that. 
Nobody's against me but Mr. Evans, and it's 
Mr. Evans that's standing in my way. He sent 
a telegram from New York saying I wasn't to be 
nominated. That's the whole trouble. If we 
can get Mr. Evans to keep his hands off, I'll have 
no difficulty. Won't you help us? We can do 
it if you'll help pull off Mr. Evans." 

"Yes," he said, "I understand that Mr. Evans 
is against you. And I've been thinking the mat- 
ter over. I'd like to see you returned to the court. 
You've been doing good work there . . . Yes 
. . . Personally Mr. Field and I admit all 
you say. You are entitled to be renominated. 
But Mr. Evans represents our interests in poli- 
tics, and, of course, you understand, politics with 
us is a matter of business. Mr. Evans represents 
our interests and we cannot very well question 
his judgment. If Mr. Evans were here, I'd make 
an exception in your favour and see him about it. 
But he's in New York " 

"Send him a telegram," I put in eagerly, "I 
can get it rushed through. I know them — down 
at the telegraph offices. We can get an answer 
back before the convention meets." 

He shook his head over it, judicially. "I'm 
afraid it's too late. Mr. Evans insists that Mr. 
Shattuck must be nominated by the Republicans. 



192 THE BEAST 

He has arranged with Mr. Speer that Judge John- 
son (Henry V. Johnson) is to be nominated on 
the Democratic ticket. I'm afraid I can't go 
behind him." 

"Well! What about the people?" I cried. 

He replied, benignly: "You have been long 
enough in politics to know the people have nothing 
to do with these things." 

He spoke as if I were a personal friend come to 
borrow money from his company, without secur- 
ity, and he regretted that he could not lend it — 
as a matter of business — though personally he 
w r ould have liked to. I felt the ground slipping 
from under my feet. I made a frantic appeal to 
him — for the sake of the work for the children 
which would be discredited all over the country 
if I were refused a nomination by both parties. 
Every one would think the Juvenile Court had 
been a failure. In other cities, where I had been 
lecturing, they would think so. They would not 
understand why I had been defeated. The move- 
ment was growing. A check to it might be fatal 
now. The other cities were looking to Denver. 
It would hurt the work for the children all over 
the states. 

"Tut, tut," he said. He thought I was "over- 
exercised" — "unduly" alarmed. Mr. Shattuck 
was an intelligent young man. He could con- 
tinue the work. Or Judge Johnson. 

By this time I had lost my self-control. I knew 



THE BEAST AT BAY 193 

that neither Shattuck nor Johnson could do the 
work of our court; they had no training for it, no 
knowledge of its methods, no understanding of 
its aims. Besides, it was the work of my life; it 
was the one thing left to me; I had fought and 
suffered for it, struggled and succeeded with it, 
when no one believed in it. And now 

I jumped up from my chair and began pacing 
about the room, arguing, pleading with him, 
almost beseeching him not to join Mr. Evans in 
crushing our court because we had done what w r as 
honest, what was right. "It's an outrage!" I 
cried, backing up against the wall before him. 
"It's an outrage that Mr. Evans should be the 
man to say whether I'm to work for the children 
in this community — or not!" 

He seemed embarrassed, as if he were a public 
executioner who pitied his victim but could not 
help him. "Sit down a minute," he w r ould say; 
and I would sit down, only to spring up again 
when his unyielding "business" considerations 
forced me to face again the hopelessness of my 
situation. "I'll run any way," I said in des- 
peration. 

"No," he warned me, "don't do that. As a 
friend, I wouldn't advise you to do that. If I 
thought you had a chance, I'd like to see you run. 
But you know it's impossible under our ballot 
laws. The people don't know how to 'scratch.' 
It's impossible." He was afraid that I was such 



194 THE BEAST 

a "headstrong young man" I might make an 
expensive independent campaign, and mortgage 
my house (he even thought of that!) and lose all 
I had. And while he spoke, calmly, the anger 
rose in my throat. I could guess why Mr. Evans 
was to give the Democratic nomination to Judge 
Johnson; wasn't it because Judge Johnson, while 
mayor of Denver, had signed a franchise for the 
tramway company against the protests of the 
whole community and in violation of the plat- 
form on which he had been elected? I could 
guess why Mr. Evans had insisted that I should 
not be nominated by either party; wasn't it because 
I had refused to job the election contests ? Weren't 
these the "business considerations" that put Mr. 
Evans against me and joined Mr. Cheesman with 
him? Mr. Cheesman might pretend to be as 
friendly and as fatherly as he chose, in his advice; 
my anger dried the blur in my eyes and I saw 
through him. I saw through him and I despised 
him. Business demanded that I should be 
crushed. The Beast required it. The tools of 
the Beast — like the grafting Commissioners who 
had rebated taxes for Mr. Cheesman's corpora- 
tions — insisted on it. The ballot laws made it 
possible — the very laws which Cheesman deplored 
and his corporations took advantage of! 

I struck my clenched hand on his table, furious 
with indignation. "I'm going to make a fight," 
I challenged him, "Will you stand by me?" 



THE BEAST AT BAY 195 

"I can't/' he hedged, "if you run independent. 
You have no chance." 

That was the end. That was the "show- 
down." I caught up my hat. "I'm going to 
fight," I said, "and fight like hell." And with- 
out waiting to hear his fluttered remonstrances I 
flung out of his office, trembling with an agitation 
I could not conceal from the clerks who stared at 
me as I hurried by. 

It was the Beast again, the whole Beast at last, 
self-acknowledged and unashamed. The people 
had "nothing to do with these things." The 
united corporations ruled the town. I had 
offended them when I fought graft, ballot-box 
stuffing, the wine rooms, the Police Board, and 
all the other effects, means and agents of their 
rule. And here I had wasted a valuable hour 
appealing to one of the patrons of this corrup- 
tion to help me fight it ! I do not know whether I 
despised Cheesman more than I despised myself 
for my trusting simplicity as I hurried back to my 
chambers that morning from my appeal to the 
head of the Children's Aid Society to save the 
Children's Court! 

I had only a few hours left. The Republican 
convention was to meet that afternoon. I tele- 
phoned to all my friends among the young Repub- 
licans, telling them that Cheesman would not help, 
that we must fight alone and at least go down 
fighting. They must hold the floor in the con- 



196 THE BEAST 

vention until we could get in the women — the 
children — anybody who would shout for us and 
intimidate the machine. I got all the men who 
had fought for me in the Republican convention 
in the spring — E. P. Costigan, James C. Stark- 
weather, Wm. W. Garwood, Willis V. Elliott, 
Horace Phelps, James H. Causey, Rodney Bard- 
well (who had not yet gone over to the corpora- 
tions) — and they got the aid of their friends. 
When the convention met, there was not a quorum 
present, but within half an hour the old Coliseum 
Hall began to fill and the fight commenced — on 
a resolution offered by ex- Judge George W. Allen* 
delegating the work of the convention to a com- 
mittee so that the machine might "knife" me 
privately behind closed doors. 

Costigan, Causey, Starkweather, Garwood, and 
the other young reformers held the floor against 
Allen, fighting for time. Delegates were pouring 
in from all parts of the city; the galleries were fill- 
ing up with cheering men, women and children. 
In an hour the place was jammed, and it was 
jammed with opponents of the machine. The 
"Treachery" extras of the morning newspapers 
had done their work, and the public enthusiasm 
that had "scared the wits out of the Boss" in the 
spring now scared the wits out of his henchmen. 
They lost control of the convention. It was less 
like a convention, as the newspapers said, than it 

* Allen is now (Jan., 1910) a District Judge in Denver. 



THE BEAST AT BAY 197 

was like the gathering of a mob. The machine 
speakers were howled down, hissed and jeered. 
The young reformers were applauded and cheered 
on. The galleries hooted and clapped. In a 
confusion of cat-calls and insults, Ex- judge Allen 
withdrew his motion; and my friends spoke for 
my nomination in the midst of an enthusiasm that 
carried all before it — in one of those waves of 
emotion that sometimes sweep conventions and 
wreck the best- contrived plans of the most astute 
politicians. In vain did tramway agents like C. 
W. Varnum try to stand against it. In vain did 
Mr. Fred J. Chamberlain,* a pillar of his (and 
Mr. Evans's) church, cry: "You fellows mustn't 
nominate Lindsey. You can't." They did. To 
the waving of handkerchiefs in the galleries, with 
"staid lawyers tossing their hats in the air" (as 
the papers said) — with Bert Shattuck withdraw- 
ing his nomination, and pandemonium let loose 
upon the angry and helpless machine men who 
could not make themselves heard — my nomina- 
tion was moved — was carried — was made 
unanimous — and the wild cheering of the con- 
vention drowned the ragtime of the brass band ! 

We had won again. At least we had carried 
the first line of the System's defence. The sec- 
ond fell when the Democratic Executive Com- 
mittee, alarmed by my apparent popularity, also 

*Mr. Chamberlain is now a member of the Colorado Railroad Com- 
mission, and Varnum of the City Civil Service Board 



198 THE BEAST 

nominated me. But the System still had the 
courts to appeal to. It had particularly Judge 
Peter L. Palmer, who had protected Cronin and 
the dive keepers; and on the application of Mil- 
ton Smith he granted a temporary injunction 
enjoining me from running — on the ground that 
my previous election was valid. (It seems impos- 
sible — doesn't it ? — but it is all on record in the 
courts of the county.) One of the attorneys in 
the case confessed to me: "The whole thing's 
fixed up. They're afraid more election protests 
will come into your court, and something has to 
be done." When we went before Palmer to 
argue against making the injunction permanent, 
we found him closeted with the machine politi- 
cians; and when he mounted the bench he ren- 
dered his decision against us without even allowing 
my lawyers to open their mouths. (This was 
not in Russia under a Czar. It was in Colorado 
under the System.) 

The public outcry was effective. The Supreme 
Court reversed Judge Palmer. Another suit was 
promptly trumped up and Palmer granted another 
injunction this time, in effect, forbidding the elec- 
tion commissioners to print my name on the official 
ballot as a candidate of the conventions that had 
nominated me. But he was reversed again on a 
ruling of the Supreme Court that such suits must 
be brought after the elections, not before them; 
and I was allowed to make my campaign, the 



THE BEAST AT BAY 199 

System meanwhile having discovered a less public 
way of getting rid of me. 

I was allowed to make my own campaign, and 
I took the opportunity of making another, directed 
against Harry A. Lindsley, who had been renom- 
inated as District Attorney, and against "Leu" 
Rogers, a notorious election crook, whom the 
Democrats had put on the ticket as State Sena- 
tor. I fought Rogers on general principles; his 
candidacy was an outrage to decency. I fought 
Lindsley because I hoped to hamstring the Beast 
by putting in an honest District Attorney. We 
succeeded in defeating both Lindsley and Rogers, 
but the man, George Stidger, who took Lindsley's 
office, proved little better than the corruptionist 
whom we displaced. (He confessed to me after- 
ward that he, too, had been nominated by Evans, 
and that Evans, personally, had given him money 
for his campaign.) 

In the fight against Lindsley and Rogers all 
the old tricks of the Beast were used against us. 
False affidavits w T ere obtained, from two unfortu- 
nate women of the streets, accusing me of unmen- 
tionable vices; but I was warned of it in advance, 
by a friendly physician who heard of it, and when 
Rogers came to my chambers to threaten the 
publication of this perjured slander, I was able 
to defy him. I had found out who the women 
were, and one of them had admitted her guilt. 
Fortunately for Rogers he went no further with 



200 THE BEAST 

the affair. I continued to make public my know- 
ledge of his record, and of Lindsley's. One day 
Rogers, crazed with whiskey, came to the Court 
House and lay in wait for me with a loaded revol- 
ver in the corridor outside my chambers, but a 
friendly deputy sheriff (Edward G. Shaffer) came 
upon him there and got the revolver from him 
and coaxed him away. 

"Judge," Rogers confessed to me afterward, 
"Those fellows down at the Democratic Club put 
me up to it. They kept saying 'Len, if the little 

said things like that about me, I'd shoot 

him!'" (Exactly the same tactics that ended in 
the shooting of Heney in San Francisco!) "I 
got drunk, and they egged me on to it." And that 
poor tool, in tears, almost went down on his knees, 
in my chambers, to ask forgiveness for the slan- 
ders he had circulated about me, the attempts he 
made to ruin me! 

Forgiveness? I could forgive him a thousand 
times over. I had never had anything but pity 
for him in my heart. But I could not forgive 
the men who had brought him to that posture 
before me — who had debased him in his own 
tears — a man like myself, crawling in spirit 
through the degradation of remorse for the crimes 
with which they had polluted him. O you rulers 
of Denver — to whom "politics is a matter of 
business" — this was your work! The bleed- 
ing Clerk in the Capitol, the poor Negro shot in 



THE BEAST AT BAY 201 

the gutter, the would-be murderer weeping over 
his shame — these are among the spoils of your 
triumph. Let your clerks and bookkeepers write 
them down in your ledgers beside the columns of 
millions which their dishonoured lives helped you 
to gain. Cheesman 

Cheesman is dead. I wish to say nothing but 
good of the dead; but "the evil a man does lives 
after him"; and of that evil I propose to say noth- 
ing but ill. What else can I say of the part that 
his corporation took in the system of evil which I 
have described? What else can I say of the his- 
tory of the Denver Union Water Company, with 
its record of taxes rebated, assessments reduced? 
What else can I say of the preparations that are 
now being made — this day, as I write — to force 
the people of Denver either to pay $14,400,000 for 
the water works or to grant the company a new 
franchise? What else can I say of the fact that 
after Mr. Cheesman's death, it was proposed to 
a complaisant City Council that our Congress 
Park — donated to the city by the Federal Govern- 
ment and valued at a million dollars — should 
be named in his honour "Cheesman Park," on 
condition that his heirs spend $100,000 erecting a 
public monument to his memory there; and the 
City Council dedicated that public park to the 
private glory of this 

No. Let us say nothing but good of the dead. 
Let us say that on the highest point of "Corpo- 



202 THE BEAST 

ration Park/' where the view of the Rockies is 
most beautiful, the rulers of Denver are building 
a marble pavilion, with fountains and electric 
lights, to perpetuate the dishonour of the Beast 
and immortalize the success of its knaveries! Let 
us not join the name of the dead to this edifice of 
public shame. Let us see in it only a memorial to 
the Beast, erected by the Beast, as a mark of 
its power over a free community betrayed and 
corrupted; and seeing in it only such a memorial, 
let us realize that a monument in Washington to 
Benedict Arnold or to Wilkes Booth would not be 
a sorer insult to the sun that shines on it, the rain 
that wets it. Let us citizens of Denver look up 
at that pavilion, when we pass, as the disfran- 
chised patriot of a subject race looked at a Roman 
Arch of Triumph in his capital, with the blood of 
indignation swelling against the iron collar on his 
neck. Let us leave the dead to their rest — for- 
given. Our war is with the living. 



CHAPTER XII 

THE BEAST AND THE SUPREME COURT 

IN a republic, such as ours, where the law is 
the only king, "there is a divinity doth hedge" 
the courts; and it is right that it should be so. If 
our democracy is to endure, we must obey the 
law and respect its agents. The man who wil- 
fully tries to impair the public credit of our courts, 
when those courts are just, is the greatest traitor 
that our country has. But what if a court is not 
just? What if it does not impartially admin- 
ister the law, but does the bidding of a ruling fac- 
tion of the community, and oppresses the help- 
less many in the interests of the powerful few? 
Must we respect the corrupt priest and minister 
of justice who degrades his almost holy office and 
defiles the very temple of justice with his iniqui- 
ties? Must we obey the court that crushes us? 
Or is it true with courts as it is with monarchs 
that " resistance Jo tyrants is obedience to God"? 
Throughout this story I have been careful to 
accuse no judge of corruption, by inference — 
to relate nothing of him but what I personally 
knew to be true. I have refrained from arguing 
any conclusions; I have left the facts to plead for 



204 THE BEAST 

themselves. I have particularly respected the 
Supreme Court of Colorado, the high altar of jus- 
tice in our state; and even when the evidences 
of corruption there were more than arguable, I 
have drawn no inferences of guilt. I have waited 
until I had followed the trail of the Beast, step 
by step, from the dives to the Police Board, from 
the Police Board to the lower courts, from the 
courts to the political leaders who nominated the 
judges of the courts, and from the political lead- 
ers to the corporation magnates who ruled all. 
But now the trail goes one step farther. It leads 
from the offices of the corporations to the doors 
of the Capitol; it ascends the steps of the State 
House; it enters the sacred precincts of the Su- 
preme Court itself. And I propose to follow it. 
I thought I had seen the footprint of the Beast 
in the Supreme Court's decisions on our three- 
fourths-jury law. I thought I had seen it in the 
decision that protected the ballot-box stuffer who 
was prosecuted by the Honest Election League. 
I thought I had seen it in the injunction that pre- 
vented me from opening the ballot boxes in the 
spring of 1904. I thought I had seen it in 1893 
when the tramway company claimed a perpetual 
franchise in Denver, contrary to the provision of 
the constitution that declared: "No law making 
an irrevocable grant of privileges, franchises or 
immunities, shall be passed by the General Assem- 
bly " — and Justice Luther M. Goddard first 



THE SUPREME COURT 205 

held that the franchise was void, and then, allowed 
a rehearing and reversed himself! (So that the 
tramway company was able to sell its stocks and 
bonds in Wall Street on the representation that 
it had "a franchise without limit as to time, and 
therefore, perpetual," in spite of the constitution, 
the law and the courts.) But these were merely 
strongly suspicious circumstances ; I needed proofs 
that were above suspicion. I got them in the 
memorable elections of the fall of 1904. 

Six months before, in the spring, the corpora- 
tions had elected Mayor Speer and his Demo- 
cratic machine men by ballot-box frauds that 
were open and admitted. But the state was nor- 
mally Republican; and the corporations now 
turned Republican in order to elect their candi- 
dates to the Legislature and the governorship. 
The Democrats were w r arned that they must not 
"stuff" the ballot boxes; and Speer in person 
carried the warning to the Democratic "Savages," 
ward heelers and election crooks — as they them- 
selves afterward confessed to me. The Sav- 
ages, having candidates,- on the Democratic 
ticket, from their own ranks, took the warning 
w T ith a countenance that did not promise well; 
and before the balloting began — on the appli- 
cation of a corporation attorney acting ostensibly 
for the Republican party — the Supreme Court 
issued a blanket injunction enjoining the election 
officials from committing ballot-box frauds, and 



206 THE BEAST 

appointed "watchers" who were responsible to 
the court alone. 

The injunction was printed in the form of a 
poster and pasted up all over the city. I saw it, and 
read it, with amazement. Not only was it without 
precedent in the whole history of American juris- 
prudence, but it was without legislative or con- 
stitutional authority, and it was in contravention 
of all the specific provisions made by law for the 
conduct of elections. It was an exercise of " kingly 
prerogative " that was declared by lawyers and 
law journals to be the most amazing act of law- 
lessness ever committed by an American court. 

It- was done avowedly to prevent the Savages 
from stuffing the ballot boxes; but the Savages 
— as I have related in a previous chapter — were 
not wholly intimidated. Some of the usual frauds 
were perpetrated (though in a much milder form 
than usual) and the Democrats carried the elec- 
tions. All the candidates on the Democratic 
county ticket were returned, excepting Lindsley 
and Rogers, against whom I had made a cam- 
paign. The Republican Governor, Peabody, was 
defeated for re-election. And the Senate was 
given a Democratic majority. 

Here was a dangerous slip in the plans of the 
corporations. A constitutional amendment had 
been carried, by which the number of Supreme 
Court justices was to be increased from three to 
seven. Two were to be promoted from the Court 



THE SUPREME COURT 207 

of Appeals, but two were to be appointed. A 
Democratic Governor would have the appoint- 
ment of these, and a Democratic Senate would 
confirm the appointments. There was no time 
now to buy up the Democratic state machine, 
even if it could be bought in its hour of triumph. 
Something had to be done. It was done — and 
done promptly. 

The Supreme Court prosecuted the Savages 
for "contempt" and imprisoned them. Then 
Gabbert and Campbell — with Justice R. W. 
Steele dissenting — ordered that certain election 
precincts, in which frauds were alleged, be not 
canvassed; the hundreds of honest Democratic 
votes in these precincts were thrown out with the 
few dishonest ones;* and, by eliminating these 
votes, the Supreme Court succeeded in declaring 
elected three Republican State Senators, eleven 
Republican representatives, and the entire Repub- 
lican county ticket — although the returns showed 
that the Democrats had carried the county by 
majorities ranging from two to five thousand; 
and even with all the "fraudulent" votes elimi- 
nated, the Democrats would have won. 

But this was not the end. The Democrats still 
had a majority of two in the Senate. So the 
State Canvassing Board, upheld by the Supreme 

* In a subsequent investigation thousands of votes that had been held 
fraudulent by the Supreme Court on the testimony of handwriting experts 
were proved honest and valid by the sworn evidence of the voters who had 
cast them. 



208 THE BEAST 

Court — although the Board had properly only 
clerical powers to canvass and make its report - - 
illegally threw out the returns from certain pre 
cincts in the counties of Boulder and Las Animas, 
and issued certificates of election to a number of 
Republican Senatorial candidates, and so manu- 
factured a Republican majority in the Senate. 

Pardon these tiresome details. They are neces- 
sary to make plain how the cards were "stacked." 
Without them, the deal that followed would be 
as bewildering as sleight-of-hand. 

The constitutional amendment that provided 
for the appointment of the new Supreme Court 
justices expressly stated that the court so con- 
stituted should not come into existence until the 
first Wednesday in April, 1905, when Governor 
Peabody would have been out of office and his 
Democratic successor sworn in. Governor Pea- 
body did not wait for the passing of April's Fool 
day. He submitted the names of the new justices to 
the manufactured Senate and got them confirmed. 
Finally — as the climax and triumphant crown 
of the whole conspiracy — the Supreme Court 
assisted the manufactured Legislature in prevent- 
ing Alva Adams, the Democratic governor- 
elect, from holding his office — although he had 
been elected by a plurality of more than 10,000 
votes. And, after an interval of legislative uproar, 
with troops ready in the Capitol and the machin- 
ery of government at a standstill — while the 



THE SUPREME COURT 209 

corporations quarrelled among themselves — a sort 
of compromise was effected by which Adams was 
unseated, Peabody w r as declared elected, his ap- 
pointments to the Supreme Court were accepted, 
but he himself resigned in favor of his lieutenant, 
Jesse McDonald. 

All this, no doubt, was nothing to the public 
but more political chicanery. I knew that it 
was corporation treason; and this is how I knew: 

At the time that Governor Peabody was con- 
sidering the appointment of the new judges, I 
happened to mention to Mr. W. G. Brown — 
then president of one of the Denver banks — 
that I intended to speak to the Governor on 
behalf of a friend who was seeking a place on the 
Supreme Court bench. "The Governor ?" Mr. 
Brown said. "Why, he hasn't anything to do 
with it. Don't you know the deal is to let the 
committee name the judges?" 

I asked "What committee?" 

"A committee," he explained, "agreed upon 
by the various 'interests.' He named the men. 
They had been chosen, he said, by the public utility 
corporations of Denver, the railroads, and the 
Colorado Fuel and Iron Co. "If your friend is 
to have any show," he told me, "he will have to 
see this committee. They are 'the big ones' who 
will pass on his qualifications. He'll be espe- 
cially strong if he can get Mr. Evans's endorse- 
ment. He'll have to satisfy these gentlemen that 



210 THE BEAST 

he's 'right' on certain questions in which they're 
interested. And if he can be depended on to 
decide such matters 'right,' he'll be considered. 
Otherwise, he needn't apply. They're going to 
have a court they can depend on." 

What were these important questions in which 
the corporations were " interested"? The most 
important, Mr. Brown said, was the right of the 
Governor to declare martial law in case of labour 
disturbances so that the right of habeas corpus 
might be suspended and the labourers prevented 
from applying to the courts in defence of their 
liberties. 

And it was not Mr. Brown alone who admitted 
the deal with Governor Peabody. Peabody's 
nephew, Mr. Geo. P. Steele, was a candidate for 
one of these appointments, and his friends had 
given it out that the Governor had promised him 
the place. One day I met Steele on the corner of 
17th and Welton streets and asked him why he 
had not been appointed. "Why, Ben," he said, 
"it was the darndest farce you ever heard of. 
The corporations had him absolutely. He had 
to appoint Bailey and Goddard. He had to 
appoint whoever the corporations wanted. I 
wouldn't go up there unless I could go 'straight.' " 

Does this seem incredible? Read then the 
Colorado Supreme Court Reports, Volume 35, 
page 325 and thereabouts. You will find it 
charged that the Colorado and Southern Rail- 



THE SUPREME COURT 211 

way Company, the Denver and Rio Grande 
Railway Company, and the public service cor- 
porations of Denver had an agreement with Gov- 
ernor Peabody whereby these corporations were 
to be allowed to select the judges to be appointed 
to the Supreme Bench. You will find it charged 
that Luther M. Goddard had been selected as a 
proper judge by the public utility corporations, 
but that the two railroad companies objected to 
him as "too closely allied with the interests of the 
Denver City Tramway Company and the Denver 
Union Water Company. " "As a last resort," 
the statement continues, "the agent and repre- 
sentative of the said Colorado and Southern Rail- 
way Company was induced to, and did, after mid- 
night on Sunday, the eighth day of January, and 
at about one o'clock in the morning on Monday 
the ninth day of January, repair to the home of 
the said Luther M. Goddard, in a carriage, calling 
him out of bed, having then and there such con- 
versation with the said Goddard that the said 
railway corporations, through their agents, with- 
drew their opposition to his confirmation, and 
they did on said morning at about three o'clock 
thereof announce to the remainder of the said 
corporations through their said agents and repre- 
sentatives, that their opposition had been with- 
drawn, and the withdrawal of the said opposition, 
having been announced, the said Senate of the 
Fifteenth General Assembly did, almost immedi- 



212 THE BEAST 

ately upon its convening on the morning of Mon- 
day, the ninth day of January, confirm the said 
nomination of the said Goddard." 

The brief containing these charges is signed 
by Senator Henry M. Teller, Ex-Cabinet Min- 
ister and United States Senator, and by Ex-Gov- 
ernor Thomas acting as counsel for Senator T. 
M. Patterson, who had made the charges in his 
paper, The Rocky Mountain News. These gentle- 
men offered to prove the charges before the court, 
but the court, in a most amazing decision, refused 
the offer, held that no matter how true such 
charges might be, it was "contempt of court" 
to make them, and fined Senator Patterson $1,000! 

Senator Patterson, rising to receive his sentence, 
protested against it, to the court, in one of the 
most scathing arraignments ever addressed to an 
American bench of justice. "If constructive con- 
tempt/' he ended, "is to be maintained as it has 
been maintained by this court, it can simply mean 
. . . that we have in each of the states of the 
union a chosen body of men who may commit 
any crime, who may falsify justice, who may defy 
the constitution and spit upon the laws, and yet 
no man dare make known the facts. . . . 
From this time forward I will devote myself . . . 
to deprive every man and every body of men of 
such tyrannical power, of such unjust and danger- 
ous prerogative. " 

His protest was no more vigorous than Justice 



THE SUPREME COURT 213 

Steele's dissent from the decision — Justice Rob- 
ert W. Steele, the judge whom I had succeeded in 
the County Court — an honest man who was in 
the minority in so many of the corporation cases 
that came before the court. He has fought the 
people's fight for years, often single-handed, in 
that court; and he is still fighting. But his term 
of office expires in the fall of 1910, and he will 
have as much chance of being reelected as any 
other honest man who is not "right" on those 
"important questions" in which the corporations 
are "interested/'* 

I understood why the corporations wished the 
Governor to have the right to declare martial 
law and suspend the habeas corpus in case of 
labour disturbances. The Cripple Creek "labour 
war" was being waged. I do not hold a brief 
for either the miners or the mine owners in that 
struggle. I do not defend the lawlessness of 
either. But I went to Cripple Creek at the time 
and talked to the labouring men and learned that 
they knew, as well as I did, who controlled the 
Supreme Court and Governor Peabody and the 
corrupt Legislature that betrayed the people. An 
intelligent labourer, who had opposed the calling of 
the strike, said to me: "No one thing ever caused 
so much ill-feeling among the labouring men 

♦No charge of corruption against Judge Campbell is here made or implied. 
Even the labouring men during these troubles recognized that Judge Camp- 
bell's decisions were those of an honest prejudice, due to his training and 
his temperament. 



214 THE BEAST 

of this state as what we considered the treach- 
ery of Judges Gabbert and Goddard in deciding 
against us on the eight-hour law!-" (Both these 
judges had been "Populists" at the beginnings 
of their careers and had been first elected by the 
votes of the labouring men.) The strike claimed 
to be a strike for an eight-hour day in certain 
mills. The Legislature had passed an eight-hour 
law, but the Supreme Court, composed at that 
time of Campbell, Gabbert and Goddard, had 
declared it unconstitutional — although the Su- 
preme Court of the United States, in a similar 
case, had held the contrary! 

When the question of the validity of my election 
of the fall of 1904 came before the Supreme Court, 
my counsel argued that I had not been legally 
elected in the spring of 1904 — because the charter 
convention had no right to provide for the elec- 
tions of county judge, district attorney, or district 
judge, since these offices had been specifically ex- 
cepted from the jurisdiction of the charter conven- 
tion by the constitutional amendment that provided 
for the convention. But the Supreme Court calmly 
held that the charter convention had no right to con- 
solidate any county office with a municipal office 
— a question that had not been brought before 
the court at all in this case, except by distant 
implication. And the effect of this decision was 
to throw out of office all the Democratic county 
office holders who had been elected with me in 



THE SUPREME COURT 215 

the spring of 1904. They had been renomi- 
nated and reelected in the fall, but the action of 
the Supreme Court, in throwing out the precincts 
in which the Democrats had obtained their majori- 
ties, had given the Republicans the offices. And 
now these Democrats found themselves on the 
streets — the very Democrats who had "mixed 
it up" in the hope of losing me "in the shuffle/' 
I was far from lost. I had been elected twice, 
by both parties. If one election was not valid 
the other was. If one party's plurality was 
declared fraudulent, I had still all the votes of the 
other party to elect me. I could laugh at the 
Beast, its frauds and its courts. 

But I did not feel like laughter. Some of the 
decisions of the Supreme Court had already had 
an awful result. They had had a result that not 
only convulsed Colorado but horrified the whole 
civilized world. 

In the spring of 1904, Chas. H. Moyer, presi- 
dent of the Western Federation of Miners, w T as 
arrested by the military authorities at Ouray on 
a charge of desecrating the American flag by 
using a printed representation of it in a campaign 
handbill. He had obtained a writ of habeas 
corpus from the local judge, but the military 
authorities in power in the strike district refused 
to surrender him — on the ground that his "rea- 
sonable further detention' ' was required by "the 
ends of public justice and the restoration of pub- 



216 THE BEAST 

lie tranquillity." His attorneys appealed to the 
Supreme Court in Denver, and the judges decided 
against him — all but Judge Steele again. 

Judge Steele held, in his dissenting opinion: 
"If one may be restrained of his liberty without 
charges being preferred against him, every other 
guarantee of the constitution may be denied him. 
When we deny to one, however wicked, a right 
plainly guaranteed by the constitution, we take 
that same right from every one. When we say 
to Mover: 'You must stay in prison, because if 
we discharge you, you may commit a crime/ we 
say that to every other citizen. When we say to 
one governor: 'You have unlimited and arbi- 
trary power,' we clothe future governors with 
that same power. We cannot change the con- 
stitution to meet conditions. We cannot deny 
liberty to-day and grant it tomorrow. We can- 
not grant it to those theretofore above suspicion 
and deny to those suspected of crime, for the con- 
stitution is for all men — * for the favourite at 
court, for the countryman at plow 5 — at all times 
and under all circumstances." 

The corporations and their court did not think 
so. Having denied the labouring man his repre- 
sentation in the Legislature and his appeal in law, 
they now denied him his most elementary con- 
stitutional right to liberty itself. What happened ? 
The inevitable happened. Harry Orchard writes 
in his terrible autobiography: "They wanted us 



THE SUPREME COURT 217 

to work on Judge Gabbert and see if we could not 
bump him off, as they were very bitter against 
him — especially Moyer. Judge Gabbert was 
Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and had 
decided against Moyer when they brought him to 
Denver from Telluride on a writ of habeas corpus, 
when he was in the hands of the militia." And 
again : " They w^ere very bitter against Judge God- 
dard, as they said he had written up most of the 
opinion in the Moyer habeas-corpus case, and had 
been instrumental in declaring unconstitutional 
the eight-hour law that had been passed by the 
Legislature a few years previous, when he was on 
the Supreme Bench before." Lawlessness had 
its inevitable result in lawlessness. 

As I walked home, one midnight, with my 
friend Dr. C. B. James, the city and county 
physician — from a performance of "Dr. Jekyll 
and Mr. Hyde" — we passed Judge Gabbert's 
house, and saw on the porch a man crouching, 
like the horrible Hyde himself, at the sill of Gab- 
bert's front window, while a confederate watched 
from the shadow of a veranda pillar. These 
two men — as we have since come to believe — 
were Harry Orchard and Steve Adams. They 
made off rapidly across the law^n and down the 
street as we approached; and after trying in vain 
to find a policeman we met Judge Gabbert's step- 
son returning home and we warned him of the 
burglars, as we thought they were. Some time 



218 THE BEAST 

before this, Dr. James had received a telephone 
message from an unknown friend in the middle 
of the night telling him not to walk down to the 
Capitol in the morning with Judge Gabbert, as 
had been his custom; and Orchard's confession 
shows that he and Adams were then planning to 
kill Gabbert, w T ith a bomb, on his way to court. 
They killed, by accident, a man named Walley, 
in a vacant lot a few blocks from my house. I 
heard the explosion of the bomb. They planted 
another bomb at Judge Goddard's gate, but it 
did not explode. They tried to waylay and 
shoot Governor Peabody, but they failed. 

And why did they do these things ? Why were 
murderous outrages committed in Colorado that 
are only paralleled by the outrages of the revolu- 
tionists in despotic Russia? Because like con- 
ditions breed like events. The government of 
Russia has been described as "a despotism tem- 
pered by assassination"; and the government 
of Colorado, in the spring of 1905, was just that! 
The crimes of Orchard — that horrified the whole 
country and blackened the name of Colorado in 
the estimation of the world — were the inevi- 
table result of the crimes of the corporations that 
made the government of Colorado an insufferable 
despotism of lawless men. The crime of the 
oppressed is a demand for justice! 

From my chambers, in which I am writing now, 
I can look out my window and see the little shop 



THE SUPREME COURT 219 

in which Orchard says the casings of his bombs 
were prepared; and from another window I can 
see the Majestic Building from which the cor- 
porations govern the state. What a government! 
And what an opposition! The millionaire uses 
his power of wealth to rob and starve and pollute 
a whole community with protected vice and 
thwarted justice and laws defied — and the exas- 
perated labourer, finding himself denied the com- 
mon rights of man, declares war against his 
oppressors with the bomb and the bullet! Who 
is the more to blame — the criminal who makes 
the conditions or the criminal who is made by 
the conditions? The one goes in broadcloth to 
his church, sleek, smug, respected, feared for his 
power and honoured for his successes. The other, 
branded with his guilt, a moral leper by his own 
confession, imprisoned for life, a shuddering hor- 
ror to the whole world, appeals to the same God 
for forgiveness Whose church the man of wealth 
so proudly enters — one of its " pillars, " its power- 
ful benefactor, its generous patron, its bland com- 
municant. I do not presume to voice the judg- 
ment of Providence upon these two men. I do 
not even predict the decrees of human justice. 
But if I had to make my choice of their fates and 
elect between the burdens of their iniquities, I 
should prefer to crouch before the altar of Orch- 
ard's prison chapel, trembling, with all his clotted 
murders on my hands. 



CHAPTER XIII 

THE BEAST AND REFORM 

SO ENDED the great conspiracy of the cor- 
porations of Colorado in the elections of 
1904. And with the triumph of that conspiracy, 
the government of Colorado changed from a 
democracy to a plutocratic oligarchy. I saw it 
then; I have seen it more clearly since. I saw 
that the people of Colorado were not free citizens, 
but enfranchised serfs. They could be killed by 
their masters with impunity, and the jury would 
"hang." As a rule, they could elect no man to 
a political office unless he served their masters — 
and my own election was merely "the exception 
that proved the rule." If they rose, in mass, to 
vote for an eight-hour law, and the Legislature 
passed such a law, their masters, through the 
mouth of the Supreme Court, declared it uncon- 
stitutional. If they rose again to pass a consti- 
tutional amendment permitting such a law, their 
masters, through the Legislature, refused to pass 
it. If they rebelled against this tyranny, and 
went on strike for their constitutional rights, and 
were lawless in their opposition to lawlessness, 
their masters, through the Governor, called out 

£20 



THE BEAST AND REFORM 221 

the militia, suspended the last pretence of justice, 
and drove them from the state. The citizen of 
Colorado had no more right to "life, liberty and 
the pursuit of happiness " than a yellow dog on the 
streets of Denver, unless he wore the corporation 
collar and tag, came to the whistle of his master 
and ate scraps from his hand. 

And it was not only that the American citizen 
in Colorado had no rights as against his masters; 
he had none as against the favoured slaves of his 
masters. I had seen it in numerous cases that 
had come to my court. For example: a junk- 
dealer had been employing boys to steal bars of 
lead from box cars, and after trying the boys I 
advised the prosecution of their employer. He 
retained a corporation lawyer to defend him before 
a justice of the peace w T ho aspired to a judge- 
ship; and the case against him was dropped. Or 
again: a man was once accused in my court of 
seducing a little girl; the District Attorney declared 
he was a "regular degenerate"; and his lawyer 
offered to plead guilty if I would put him on 
probation. I refused to. A new lawyer was 
brought into the case — a corporation tool w T ho 
was then County Attorney — and there was an 
immediate change in the fervour of the prosecu- 
tion. The District Attorney reported that he had 
investigated the charge and found no evidence 
against the man; and I was compelled, under the 
law, to accept a "nolle, 5 ' which amounted to a 



222 THE BEAST 

dismissal of the case. This sort of thing pre- 
vailed even in divorce suits. It prevailed in every 
sort of suit that a corporation lawyer could be 
retained to defend before a corporation judge. 
Just as the king's favourites in France, before the 
Revolution, were free to commit any outrage upon 
the citizens who had no court influence, so, in 
Colorado, the favourite who wore the livery of the 
corporations — or was able to retain a favourite 
who did — could spit upon the freeman, could 
debauch the son of the freeman, could violate the 
daughter of the freeman, and then appeal confi- 
dently to the corporation ministers of justice to pro- 
tect him. Our boasted " government of the people, 
for the people and by the people'' had passed away. 
Does this seem an intemperate statement of the 
facts ? I hope not. It would distress me to have 
any one suspect me of impatience. I am trying 
to relate my experiences, in the Jungle, with the 
Beast, as dispassionately as possible, without any 
colour of prejudice, coolly, for the benefit of those 
of you who live sheltered private lives, purred to 
in prosperity. I do not raise my voice. If I say 
that you are not a citizen of a democracy but a sort 
of enfranchised house slave of an oligarchy of cor- 
porate wealth, I say it, believe me, in the politest 
tone conceivable. It is merely a condition which 
I wish you to recognize. If, after you have recog- 
nized it, you are still content to sit by your fire- 
side and leave politics to your masters, at least 



THE BEAST AND REFORM 223 

you can do so without having been unnecessarily 
annoyed. If the democracy is to die, by all means 
let it die decently, with resignation, on a feather 
bed. Let it not make a noisy finish, like a stuck 
pig, dragged from its comfortable pen and pros- 
perity's full hog trough, to have its throat cut, 
squealing shrilly, while the rest of the world 
jeers. 

In the spring of 1905, I admit, I was not so 
philosophical. I had just come through a hot 
campaign and my blood was still intemperate. 
I was prepared to stir up an insurrection among 
my fellow-serfs, and I believed that such an insur- 
rection could be made successful. I had not been, 
for so long, an opponent of the Beast without 
having learned the sources of its power. I had seen 
that whenever it was attacked in its jungle, it 
took refuge up a tree. I believed that we could 
fell that tree, with the animal in its top — bring 
the brute dowm, stunned by its fall — and dis- 
patch it where it lay, before it could recover. In 
other words, I had seen that the corporations 
derived their power from their control of politics, 
and that they controlled politics largely through 
the election laws. If we could reform the election 
laws so as to make the will of the people effective, we 
could overturn the throne of the plutocracy and 
have the king sprawling at the feet of his subjects. 
After that, we could make what terms with him 
we pleased. 



224 THE BEAST 

We needed, first of all, a registration law to pre- 
vent ballot-box stuffing, so that Boss Evans might 
not have voters "good for 500 votes" each, while 
the people had only voters of a vote apiece. Then, 
if we could get a real Australian ballot law, with 
a headless ballot — so that the people might be 
able to vote for candidates instead of parties — 
we would make it possible for an independent 
man to succeed in an independent campaign, and 
prevent Boss Evans from using the name of 
Roosevelt or Bryan to elect a ticket of corrup- 
tionists. Next, with an effective direct primary 
law, we could abolish the machine caucus and 
convention — in which the corporations choose 
the candidates for whom the people are to be 
allowed to vote — make it possible for the voters 
to choose their own representatives and free the 
honest politician from the necessity of going to 
Big Steve, or Boss Speer, or any other corpora- 
tion favourite, for permission to aspire to a poli- 
tical office. And finally, with a "corrupt prac- 
tices act," we could limit campaign expenses, 
make it unnecessary to appeal to the wealthy 
corporations for contributions, and make it pos- 
sible for an independent candidate to compete 
against a party man without mortgaging his house 
or selling his independence. 

In short, what we most needed — and do still 
need — was not laws against trusts and corpora- 
tions, limiting their powers and restraining their 



THE BEAST AND REFORM 225 

activities, but laws for the people, permitting them 
to use their power and restoring to them the tools of 
democracy, which the corporations have taken 
from them. It is useless to agitate for "govern- 
ment control of trusts" as long as the trusts are 
able, through our machinery of elections, to con- 
trol the government that is to control them. Once 
let us regain control of our legislatures, our courts 
and our public officials — by regaining control 
of the process of electing them — and we shall 
have the corporations where the sans-culottes had 
King Louis and his favourites before the Reign 
of Terror. Then 'ware the figurative guillotine! 

With this pleasing prospect in my hope, I began 
to work on a series of bills to reform the election 
laws, and I began to stir up a popular demand for 
such laws by means of public speeches, newspaper 
articles and the like. And because this same 
campaign will have to be fought in every state in 
the union in which it has not yet been fought, I 
wish to chronicle it here in sufficient detail to 
explain the tactics that were used against us, the 
methods by which we succeeded and the reasons 
for which we failed. 

We opened fire in the newspapers — and espe- 
cially in the Denver Post, through a clever edito- 
rial writer named Paul Thieman who had given 
me a vital aid in my two previous election con- 
tests. The Post was then as independent as a 
highwayman. One of its proprietors, H. H. 



226 THE BEAST 

Tammen, had begun life as a barkeeper, and he 
would himself relate how he had made money by 
robbing his employer. "When I took in a dollar/' 
Tammen said, "I tossed it up — and if it stuck to 
the ceiling, it went to the boss." He had a frank 
way of making his vices engaging by the honesty 
with which he confessed them; and he had 
boasted to me of the amount of money the news- 
paper made by charging its victims for suppress- 
ing news-stories of a scandalous nature in which 
they were involved. He admitted that he sup- 
ported me merely because it was "the popular 
thing to do" — it "helped circulation." I knew 
it was a very precarious support, although the 
editorial writer, Paul Thieman, seemed to me 
an honest and public-spirited young man. 

The Rocky Mountain News, the official organ 
of the Democratic party, also aided us. (It was 
owned by Senator Patterson.) But there was a 
wing of the Democratic party for which it could 
not speak — the corporation machine faction led 
by Boss Speer — and I had yet to learn how strong 
that faction was. The Denver Republican, of 
course, was not in our camp ; it is a corporation 
organ simply. But the Republicans were not 
unwilling to have the popularity of the children's 
court as an asset of their ticket, and their paper 
did not openly oppose our reform of the election 
laws. 

There, then, were the three typical newspapers 



THE BEAST AND REFORM 227 

of a typical American city; and we had two of 
them with us and one preserving a sort of armed 
neutrality. After a preliminary cannonade of 
articles and editorials, our reform bills were given 
to Senator W. W. Booth, whom we had elected 
by defeating "Len" Rogers; and Senator Booth 
introduced them in the Senate. 

This immediately "developed" the position of 
the corporation tools in the Legislature. The 
Republican sub-boss, George Graham, held a par- 
ley with Senator Booth, and Booth reported to 
us: "They say there's absolutely no hope for the 
direct primary law or the Massachusetts ballot. 
Neither party organization will stand for it. But 
there's been a big fuss about padded registration 
in Denver and in Pueblo, and something may have 
to be done in that matter for fear the party will be 
injured. I think w^e can get them to give us a 
show to put through the registration reform, but 
they say that if I try to pass the other two bills, 
they'll not even let us have the registration law." 

I understood, of course, that the "they" who 
spoke were the corporation representatives. The 
Democratic chairman, Milton Smith, and other 
Democrats, like Senator Billy Adams, always 
faithful to the public-service corporations, opposed 
the bills as stubbornly as the Republicans did. 
The corporation lobbyists worked with a will 
against them. William R. Freeman, a corpora- 
tion lobbyist whom I met one day on the street, 



228 THE BEAST 

said frankly, in reply to my arguments for a reform 
of the election laws: "Yes, they do give us the 
power to rule the people, but why shouldn't we 
have it? You know the corporations give this 
state good government. Look what Speer has 
done for Denver. Suppose the corporations have 
got millions of dollars' worth of franchises; they 
know how to use them and the people don't. 
Now be honest! You know the people aren't fit 
to govern themselves. If the corporations of this 
state didn't do it for them, what kind of a state 
w T ould we have?" He pointed to some work- 
ingmen digging in the street. "Do you think we 
are going to be ruled by a lot of cattle like that ? 
What do they know about government? No, sir. 
We rule, and we're going to continue to!" 

Freeman was frank. The men in the Legisla- 
ture were not. They had been elected by the 
votes of "the people not fit to govern themselves" 
and it was necessary to add hypocrisy to treason. 
The bills were referred to committees and the 
doors of silence were locked on them. We bat- 
tered at the doors. 

Thus far the corporations had been apparently 
on the defensive, entrenched and silent; and we 
were preparing to push the assault, when sudl- 
denly we discovered a flank movement that Iiad 
been weeks afoot and was now sweeping in tri- 
umphantly upon us. In the very first days of the 
session my old law partner, whom I have called 



THE BEAST AND REFORM 229 

Senator "Gardener/' had introduced two bills 
that would have made my position as County 
Judge untenable, and one of these bills had almost 
passed the Senate before I knew that it had 
been even introduced. They provided that County 
Judges in counties of the first class (which referred 
only to Denver) should not be permitted to leave 
the city except in July, and should not be allowed 
to call in a judge to assist in the work of the County 
Court. It was humanly impossible for one man 
to do the work of my court, and Gardener and his 
corporation masters knew it. We were forced 
temporarily to use all our efforts in the Legislature 
to defeat these "spite bills," and we were put on 
the defensive thereby. It is an old trick of the 
Beast, but an effective one. 

The newspapers came to our rescue; the women 
held meetings in their clubs; the boys marched 
through the streets with banners; and Senator 
Gardener found himself beaten upon by a storm 
of public abuse that has marked him for life. The 
people, though they did not yet see the Beast, 
saw that the Juvenile Court was in danger, and 
rallied at once to the support of a "moral issue." 
(Woman's suffrage in Colorado has done that, at 
least, for our politics.) The women packed the 
legislative committee rooms at the Capitol when 
I spoke against the bills; and the House did not 
dare to pass them. 

A few days before this, while I was at luncheon 



230 THE BEAST 

in a restaurant, Mr. R. D. Thompson — the law- 
yer under whom Gardener and I had served our 
apprenticeship — came to the table at which I 
sat and gave me a warning from Gardener. If, 
(Gardener had said) I dared to say anything pub- 
licly that would reflect on him or any of his friends 
they would "spend a thousand dollars in circu- 
lating a story" that would ruin me in the estima- 
tion of the women, and end my career. 

" Well," I said, "what the deuce does he mean ?" 

Mr. Thompson replied: "I don't know. He 
didn't tell me any more than that — and he said 
I'd better tell you, because they believe you're 
going to go before the House at the hearing on 
these bills and make some statements reflecting 
on him — something that he did, which you claim 
is the animus behind these bills." 

I knew, then, that Gardener referred to the 
visit he had made to me in my home and his request 
that I should "job" the Springer election contest 
for him. I went straight to Gardener's office to 
demand what he meant by his threat. He was 
not in. I wrote him a letter and told him that if 
he knew anything reflecting on my character it 
was his duty to make it public, and I released him 
from every confidential or friendly obligation to 
conceal it. He wrote in reply that he knew noth- 
ing against me, and he denied having made the 
threat. 

This was all very well. But he continued to 



THE BEAST AND REFORM 231 

circulate his slanders. He poured them into the 
ear of Senator William L. Clayton, for example, 
and Senator Clayton repeated them to me. They 
came to the knowledge of my brother and my 
friends. It was evident that the Beast had 
turned "polecat" again. I went to the news- 
papers and gave them the whole story of Garden- 
er's attempt to influence me into jobbing the elec- 
tion cases and I challenged him to substantiate any 
of his slanderous charges against me. In other 
words, I set the dogs of publicity upon the Beast 
and drove it to its burrow. 

Do you think I w^as done with it, then ? Gentle 
reader, you do not know the "animal." Slander 
is one of its choicest and most effective weapons. 
Come to Denver to-day and hear some sweet and 
motherly little woman, at her dinner table, among 
her children, tell you, "Yes, I voted for Judge 
Lindsey — in spite of his private life." Abomin- 
able stories about me, circulated privately, are 
privately believed, despite the fact that there is 
not a corporation crook in Denver who would not 
dance with joy if he could find the slightest evi- 
dence on which to base a charge of immorality 
against me. My private life has been gone over 
with a microscope. I have been followed by 
detectives. Faces have peered in my library win- 
dow at night when I have been sitting there, 
talking with friends. My chambers in the Court 
House have been broken into, my desk drawers 



232 THE BEAST 

forced open, and my letter files searched. Bribes 
have been offered the officers of my court to find 
or manufacture evidence of my moral turpitude. 
Nothing has been found on which the harpies 
could build even a presumption of guilt that would 
endure the light. And yet the slanders circulate! 

I have proof, too, that they are deliberately 
circulated. In 1904, when I was opposing the 
election of "Len" Rogers and District Attorney 
Lindsley, Paul Thieman, of the Post, came upon a 
young brood of slanderous lies that had been 
hatched out at the Democratic Club. He spoke to 
a politician about them. " You know Judge 
Lindsey," he said. "You don't really believe 
those stories, do you?" 

"No," the politician replied, "but we've got to 

get the little some way. There'll be a 

lot of people believe them." And he described 
how some sensitive reformer in San Francisco — 
whose name I have forgotten — had been over- 
whelmed by just such calumnies. 

If this method of attack were peculiar to the 
Beast in Denver, I should not refer to it here. 
But do you know|what stories were told of District 
Attorney Jerome in New York, of Senator La Fol- 
lette in Wisconsin, of Governor Folk in Missouri, 
of Heney in San Francisco and even of President 
Roosevelt ? O you citizens of the United States — 
who are "not fit to govern" yourselves — the 
manufacture and circulation of these stories is 



THE BEAST AND REFORM 233 

one of the operations of the powers that govern 
you. It is this defilement that has helped to make 
our politics so dirty. It is your credence of these 
lies that has made the honour of public office so 
often a garment of torture to the man who wears 
it. Beware your Beast when it turns "pole- 
cat"! Remember always that if there was a 
word of honest evidence on which to defend these 
stories, they would be printed in every corpora- 
tion newspaper in the country! 

Well, we defeated Senator Gardener's spite bills 
and turned again to our campaign of reform; and 
by this time it was evident that we could hope for 
no more than the passage of our registration law. 
The other bills were pigeonholed in committees, 
guarded by corporation representatives like the 
Democratic Senator "Billy" Adams, who has sat 
for more than twenty years in our Senate, sunken- 
lipped, glint-eyed, with the beak of a buzzard, 
waiting silently like an old scald-head hawk to 
pounce upon any reform measure that threatens 
the "plum tree" of the corporations. 

But our registration bill apparently had a chance 
of becoming law. It passed along quietly through 
the Senate — to my amazement — a little muti- 
lated now and then by an amendment, but still 
effective. I watched its course with interest, puz- 
zled by its success. I began to hope that the 
public outcry against the ballot frauds had put 
the fear of the popular wrath into the hearts of 



234 THE BEAST 

the machine politicians. And certainly the outcry 
had been loud. We had defeated the Democratic 
candidate for District Attorney in Denver, and 
elected a Republican, who had instituted a vigor- 
ous prosecution of the Democratic "stuffers." 
In Pueblo, the Republican District Attorney had 
been defeated, and apDemocratic District Attorney 
was prosecuting the Republican " stuff ers." The 
public was applauding both. The henchmen 
and ward heelers and even some sub-bosses of 
both parties were in danger of the penitentiary; 
and on the wave of this "reform movement" our 
new law seemed to be borne gaily along. 

And then the mystery was explained to me by 
Senator W. W. Booth. He had discovered that 
the two corporation bosses had come together and 
agreed "to swap prisoners." Our registration 
bill had a clause that repealed the old registration 
law "save and except as to all violations thereof 
and prosecutions pending thereunder"; and when 
the bill came up for the final vote, this "saving 
clause" was struck out. 

I hastened at once to see Governor McDonald, 
explained the plot to him, and besought him, upon 
receiving the mutilated bill, to return it to the 
Legislature with a message exposing this premedi- 
tated jail delivery and demanding the reinstate- 
ment of the w saving clause." He replied calmly 
that the facts were probably as I had related — 
tha* he had been so advised from other sources. 



THE BEAST AND REFORM 235 

(The District Attorney in Pueblo had telegraphed 
him that the passage of the amended bill would 
free some 200 ballot-box stuffers against whom 
there were indictments .) But he said : ' ' You can't 
get the law, in my judgment, unless you get it 
in this way." And we had to take what we 
could get. 

The ballot-box stuffers immediately appealed 
to the Supreme Court, under the new law, for a 
stay in the proceedings against them. The judges 
decided that the passage of the new law repealed 
the old one, and they held that since the clause 
4 'save and except as to all violations thereof" had 
been stricken out — and a repeal of all penalties 
for crimes thereunder deliberately inserted — it 
was no doubt the intention of the Legislature to 
grant a pardon to the criminals. We lost the 
thieves, but we got the instrument against them; 
and it has been effective. Billy Green, the noto- 
rious election crook, has since borne unwilling 
testimony to that effect. In districts where there 
had been 5,000 voters registered in the old days, 
less than 1,000 were now on the books. The 
corporations had lost their voters "good for 500 
votes apiece," and the people of Colorado were 
one step nearer freedom. 

I was elated. We had not only forced a reform, 
but it proved practical; and of all our bills the 
registration measure was the only one of whose 
effect there had been any question. Our direct 



236 THE BEAST 

primary law was after Senator La Follette's ideas, 
some of which had been adopted in Wisconsin. 
The headless ballot law had shown its strength 
in Massachusetts. If we could get those two 
laws, now, we should be able to hear Lincoln's 
Gettysburg address read in Colorado without 
turning pale. 



CHAPTER XIV 

A CITY PILLAGED 

HAVE I convinced you yet? Do you still 
think I am crying "Wolf! Wolf!" when 
there is no wolf, or do you believe that we indeed 
do have our fabled dragon, to which some of us 
are daily sacrificed — that lives upon us — that 
the daughters of the poor are fed to, no less than 
the sons of the rich? Or do you think that it is, 
after all, a rather harmless brute whom some of 
us in Colorado have goaded to a natural rage — 
a domestic animal properly — a milch cow, per- 
haps, that has to have its fodder but repays us in 
the rich cream of prosperity ? Do you agree with 
the candid Freeman that government by corpora- 
tions is not so bad a thing ? Then let me — before 
I proceed with the story of our struggle for a reform 
of our election laws — let me add one more instance 
of what that kind of government entails. Let me 
show it as I saw it in my court room in the spring 
of 1906. Let me put you on the bench there to 
judge it, and decide. 

Under the constitutional amendment that had 
granted the city of Denver in 1902 the right to 
make its own charter, it had been provided that 

237 



238 THE BEAST 

the citizens should dispose of franchises to public 
service corporations by the direct vote of the tax- 
paying electors, and not, as in the past, through 
the City Council. In 1906 the Denver Gas and 
Electric Company applied for a franchise for 
twenty years, and the tramway company applied 
for an extension of some of its franchises, without, 
however, waiving its claims to a perpetual fran- 
chise. The gas company wished also the power 
to take over the electric plant of a local company 
that by its charter could not sell except to the city; 
and the Denver and Northwestern Railroad wished 
an entrance to the city and a right of way. For 
these monopoly rights in the streets of Denver 
nothing was offered to the citizens of Denver 
except by the gas company, which agreed to pay 
$#0,000 per annum, and by the street railway 
company, which engaged itself to pay the city 
$60,000 a year on condition that a certain part of 
the money be spent on the public parks and for 
park amusements (to which, of course, the tramway 
company would carry the crowds!). 

These franchises were voted upon in the spring 
elections. Before election day it began to be freely 
charged that in the offices of the County Asses- 
sor and the County Treasurer, where the lists of 
tax-paying electors were being made up, great 
numbers of citizens were being assessed upon triv- 
ial articles of personal property, so that they 
might be qualified to vote. It was charged, too, 



A CITY PILLAGED 239 

that "fake" tax receipts were being issued to 
employees of the utility corporations. And a 
league of citizens, through their lawyers, at once 
applied to the District Court (Judge Frank T. 
Johnson*) for a w T rit similar to that issued by the 
Supreme Court in 1904 against the "Savages," 
to prevent election frauds. Judge Johnson held 
that if the Supreme Court could grant such a writ 
the District Court could do the same. 

He issued it. The elections were held, and 
on the face of the returns the franchises were 
granted. 

But the majority in favour of the grant was very 
small — ninety-nine for the tramway franchise and 
about five hundred for the gas franchise on the 
official recount. The tax-receipt frauds w T ere evi- 
dent. Hundreds of votes had been cast upon 
taxes of a few cents levied on almost worthless 
land that lay out on the prairies. And the league 
of citizens, under Judge Johnson's writ, applied 
for an investigation in his court. He decided to 
hold it. 

Subpoenas were issued to the boys who had 
voted on the "ten-cent" tax receipts and to the 
woman in the Treasurer's office who had made 
out these receipts. The woman promptly fled 
from town. The County Treasurer rose from 
his sick bed to deny responsibility for having 

*Judge Johnson did his duty to the community bravely in these cases. 
The System crushed him at the next election. 



240 THE BEAST 

issued the receipts, discharged the chief clerk 
under whose instructions the work had been done, 
collapsed in his office and died that same after- 
noon at his home. It was charged that more 
than -2.000 fraudulent receipts had been issued. 
It was proved that the receipts had been issued 
wholesale and distributed among the clerks of the 
gas company office. The clerks, called to the 
witness stand, either perjured themselves by swear- 
ing that thev had bought the land through Mr. 
Frank W. Freuauff of the gas company, or 
practically confessed their guilt by refusing 
to testify lest they might incriminate them- 
selves — a privilege that every criminal has under 
the law. 

Does this sound merely technical ? Ah. you 
should have been in that court and watched those 
poor boys — honest sons of good families, who 
had been driven at the bidding of their employers 
to commit a crime — standing there before the 
bar of justice, admitting their shame while their 
wives and mothers watched with tears in their 
eyes. You should have heard them floundering 
through their perjuries, red-faced and guilty, 
while the officers of the gas company watched 
them with a cynical smile. And you should 
have seen Henry L. Doherty. president of the 
gas company, when he was called to the stand 
and refused to testify — refused to do for him- 
self what he had let these bovs do for him — and 



A CITY PILLAGED 241 

with a contemptuous sneer on his face denied 
the jurisdiction of the court and would give no 
evidence before it. 

That court represented the sovereign power of 
the people. But Henry L. Doherty was protected 
by the sovereign pow r er of the Beast. That 
court had the right under the law to hear the case 
and give judgment upon it; and the question of 
its jurisdiction should then have been decided, 
upon appeal. But Henry L. Doherty had the 
lawless power of the Beast to smile at court 
procedure, to despise law, and to teach anarchy by 
example. Judge Johnson sentenced him for con- 
tempt. He went out smiling in the custody of a 
deputy sheriff. One of his attorneys rushed to 
the telephone and called up the Clerk of the 
Supreme Court and said in the voice of a man 
talking to his office boy, "Hurry up with that writ." 
Doherty made a triumphal descent of the Court 
House staircase, smiled at by the crowds in the 
halls, as if he were the hero of some huge practi- 
cal joke that was admirable in its insolence; and 
he was taken by the Sheriff to a neighbouring 
hotel where he waited until Judge Gabbert directed 
his release under a writ of habeas corpus — a 
proceeding which the Supreme Court itself after- 
ward repudiated as illegal. 

However, the Supreme Court granted a tempo- 
rary writ restraining Judge Johnson from proceed- 
ing with his investigation; and later, a majority 



242 THE BEAST 

of the judges of the Court made that writ perma- 
nant and so held that Judge Johnson had no right 
to do for the people in 1906 what the Supreme 
Court had done — for whom ? — in 1904. Judges 
Steele and Gunter dissented. They held that 
though the action of the Supreme Court in 1904 
was "without precedent 5 ' and "not based upon 
any recognized rule of equity jurisprudence/' it 
was "nevertheless, until reversed, the law of this 
state.' 5 They held that the decision of the 
Supreme Court in 1904 declared that it was "in 
the power of a court of equity to supervise elections 
by injunction." They held that the Supreme 
Court could not claim such a right for itself and 
deny the same right to the District Court, for by 
doing so the Supreme Court "arrogates to itself 
an exclusiveness expressly disavowed in many 
other opinions and assumes a superiority denied 
it by the constitution." The other judges over- 
rode this dissent. They did not propose to strain 
at a gnat after having swallowed a camel. They 
denied Judge Johnson's jurisdiction, and his 
investigation collapsed. 

Balked there, the league of citizens applied for 
a grand jury investigation; but since their com- 
plaint alleged a conspiracy of the corporations to 
buy up and control both parties in the elections, 
the League asked the appointment of a special 
Sheriff and a special District Attorney on the case. 
Judge Mullins granted the investigation, and 



A CITY PILLAGED 243 

appointed officers in place of the suspected Sheriff 
and District Attorney Stidger. Another appeal 
was taken to the Supreme Court, and the Court 
again intervened and stopped the proceedings, on 
the ground that the Sheriff and the District Attor- 
ney could not be displaced — in the face of Justice 
Steele's dissenting opinion, that the case came 
"within the doctrine announced in the People vs. 
District Court, 29 Colorado, 5, where the right 
of the District Judge to appoint a special officer 
to advise the Grand Jury whenever he has 
reason to believe, from information which he con- 
siders reliable, that crimes have been committed 
and that the officers' conduct in connection there- 
with is such that it should be investigated, is 
expressly confirmed. " 

The franchise investigation was finally brought 
before me. As judge of the County Court, I had 
the right, under the charter, "to hear all election 
contests." The lawyers for the corporations filed 
affidavits charging me with prejudice and demand- 
ing a change of venue. I refused to grant it. An 
appeal was taken to Judge Malone of the District 
Court, and the corporation lawyers argued there 
that I had no jurisdiction. "Some of the counsel 
for the petitioners," Judge Malone said in his 
decision, "were frank enough to tell the Court 
that they did not think there was any court that 
had jurisdiction to consider, investigate or pass 
upon the validity of the franchises in question, 



244 THE BEAST 

or as to whether they were lawfully carried. They 
say that there having been no court or tribunal 
established or named for the purpose, there is a 
radical defect in the legislation upon the subject, 
which can only be corrected by further legislation. 
. . . I cannot believe this to be true." He 
resolved the doubt in the case in favour of the 
people, and held that the County Court had the 
right to hear the contest. He has since admitted 
that he had been warned that if his decision went 
against the corporations he could not be renom- 
inated to the bench; and he has not been renomi- 
nated ! 

The case before me continued. There con- 
tinued also a general exodus from Denver that 
became one of the jokes of the newspapers. " Bill" 
Evans, president of the tramway company, had 
gone East. Freuauff, the manager of the gas 
company, had taken an early train. "Bill" 
Davoren, chairman of the Democratic City and 
County Central Committee had flown, and a 
friend of his came to my chambers to ask that I 
grant him immunity on the promise that the 
organization would back me as a candidate for 
the Governorship. Scores of young clerks made 
off, their travelling expenses paid (as some of them 
have since confessed to me) by the gas company. 
The mothers of others — or their wives — came 
to my chambers with pitiful tales of poverty and 
lack of employment, and told me that their sons 



A CITY PILLAGED 245 

or their husbands had been compelled to cast 
fraudulent votes or lose the work on which they 
depended for their daily bread. (The victims of 
the Beast!) One of the guilty clerks was the 
son of the Bishop of one of Denver's churches, and 
I was besought for the sake of his father, for the 
sake of the congregation, for the sake of religion 
and public decency, not to put him on the witness 
stand. (He finally escaped the process server 
and got out of town.) A young man came to con- 
fess to me that he had committed perjury in Judge 
Johnson's court, believing that the corporations 
would "square it"; "for," he said, "it's been 
common talk that the corporations control the 
Supreme Court and wouldn't let us get into 
trouble." All day in my chambers, every eve- 
ning in my home, these trembling slaves of corpora- 
tion government besieged me with their petitions 
for clemency; and the pitiful guilt and moral 
degradation of it all made life a nightmare. These 
people were not the "lower classes" of the slums 
whom you are accustomed to think of as born to 
shame and suffering. They were not the work- 
ing men who are "cattle" to such as Freeman, 
and in his opinion "not fit to govern them- 
selves." They were those whom you, "gentle 
reader," are accustomed to consider as good as 
yourself. And yet they were dragged through 
the mire of fraud and perjury just as you and 
your children and your wives and your mothers 



246 THE BEAST 

will be dragged, if the Beast in your commu- 
nity ever finds the need to drag you. Never 
doubt it! 

The case continued. Party workers were put 
on the stand and admitted that they had received 
money from the party organizations and had 
voted for the franchises. The clerks and their 
wives who had voted on the fraudulent tax- 
receipts either refused to testify lest they should 
incriminate themselves, or perjured themselves 
so flagrantly that the court was compelled to 
warn them. Scenes similar to those that I 
had watched in Judge Johnson's court were 
repeated in mine; and Henry L. Doherty, and 
those of his fellow-officials who had not suc- 
ceeded in getting out of town, smiled as they 
listened. 

Then, in order to prove that the money paid by 
the political organizations to their workers had come 
from the corporations, Doherty was ordered to the 
witness stand. He refused to testify. With his 
arms crossed, backed by his lawyers, he denied 
the jurisdiction of the court and silently dared 
us to punish him. 

I pointed out to him, mildly, that the question 
of the jurisdiction of the court was one to be set- 
tled by appeal from the judgment of the court in 
the case; that no citizen had the right to interrupt 
court proceedings by such an arbitrary defiance 
as his. And I fined him $500 and sentenced him 



A CITY PILLAGED 247 

to imprisonment in the County Jail until he should 
decide to testify. 

I passed the same sentence on Mr. Fred. Wil- 
liams, chairman of the Republican City and 
County Committee, on the president of the 
Election Commission, and on Mr. J. Cooke, Jr., 
who followed Doherty's example. They reflected 
his amused smile. He was not only president 
of the gas company in Denver, but he was (or 
had been) president of gas or electric companies 
in Madison, Wis., Lincoln, Neb., Quebec, 
Canada, Milwaukee, Wis., Grand Rapids, Mich., 
St. Paul, Minn., Binghamton, N. Y., San Antonio, 
Tex., and St. Joseph, Mo. He crossed his arms 
on his importance and defied the law. 

I summoned the Deputy Sheriff ("Ed" G. Shaf- 
fer) and warned him that the court's order must 
be obeyed, that Doherty must go to jail and that if 
any special privileges were granted to him or the 
other prisoners I would punish for contempt of 
court any officer that granted such privileges. 
The corporation lawyers interposed with a request 
that I merely leave Doherty in the custody of the 
sheriff till writs could be obtained to free him, 
pending an appeal. I refused the request. They 
asked, then, that I suspend sentence until they 
could get up the record of the case on which the 
writs had to be obtained. I refused that request 
also. "If any poor man came to this court," I 
said, "and refused to be sworn, no such privileges 



248 THE BEAST 

as you ask for would be granted him. I have 
never known any one to show such contempt 
for a court as this man has. I refuse to stop 
the court proceedings so that the Clerk of the 
Court may write up the record. The defendant 
will get strict justice from this court and no 
more." 

By this time Doherty's smile was more defiant 
but less contemptuous. He went out, in charge 
of the deputy, with the expression of face that I 
have seen a hundred times upon the incorrigible 
bad boys who had been sentenced in the Juve- 
nile Court. He went to jail; and he and his 
fellows were entered on the warden's books 
with a prisoner who was held on a charge of 
murder. 

There — judging from the newspaper pictures 
of him behind the bars — his smile rather faded. 
The county jail was not built to furnish million- 
aires with luxury. The cells are clean but bare; 
the bars are tastefully painted with aluminum 
paint; the floors are made of iron plate filled with 
rivets; the beds are hammocks that are not slung 
until nightfall; when the prisoner wishes to sit 
down, he sits on the floor. 

Doherty remained there while the court record 
was being prepared. The Clerk took no more 
time than usual with that record — but no less. 
And if the reports that came to me are to be 
believed, Mr. Doherty became rather angry, as 



A CITY PILLAGED 249 

night followed day, and day night, and no writ 
arrived to free him. He expressed a very low 
opinion of his lawyers. He was, I believe, the first 
and only trust magnate in this country who 
ever found himself in such a pitiable situation ; and 
his indignation was natural. He remained there 
during three days and two nights, before a new 
act of court lawlessness freed him. 

The Supreme Court was on its vacation, and 
a single judge was unable to stay the pro- 
ceedings of a lower court. The only action 
a single Supreme Court judge could take 
was the granting of a writ of habeas corpus; 
and, under the ruling of the court in the pre- 
vious case in Judge Johnson's court, a writ of 
habeas corpus was not the proper remedy in 
contempt cases. But there was still sitting in 
the District Court the notorious Judge Peter L. 
Palmer; and Judge Palmer issued a w T rit of 
habeas corpus freeing Doherty and his associates 
on the ground that the Supreme Court was not 
in session. 

Judge Palmer had no more right to issue such 
a writ than one of the gas company's office boys. 
He was as lawless, in doing so, as Doherty had 
been in refusing to testify. I immediately ordered 
the Sheriff to recapture his prisoners and return 
them to my court. But they had fled. "I have 
searched the entire city," the Sheriff reported, "but 
I can find none of them." The newspapers found 



250 THE BEAST 

Doherty in Lincoln, Nebraska, safely beyond the 
jurisdiction of the court. The others remained 
in hiding until the Supreme Court met and decided 
substantially that though my court, under the 
charter, had been granted jurisdiction in all cases 
of contested elections, the franchise investigation 
was not such a case and the legislature had not 
specifically empowered the court to hear franchise 
cases.* 

I have written all this as baldly as possible, so 
as to have the facts before you uncoloured by prej- 
udice. But do you realize what these facts mean ? 
Do you realize that the citizens of Denver, 
robbed of millions of dollars by a franchise steal, 
found themselves in 1906 with no court under 
heaven to which they could appeal for redress ?f 
Do you realize that the robbers, caught in the 
act, were able to laugh at their victims and defy 
the law? Can you consider what an example 
of citizenship was set for those young men and 
women who were compelled to betray their city, 
to perjure themselves on an oath before their 

*A ridiculous quo warranto suit was subsequently prosecuted by District 
Attorney Stidger (!) before Judge Peter L. Palmer (!). Do I need to say 
that the result of that suit was favorable to the corporations ? 

tWe had a bill introduced in the Legislature of 1909 providing that the 
county court could adjudicate upon franchise election contests. The bill 
was defeated by the corporation representatives. Now, under their con- 
tentions — already sustained in part by the decision of the Supreme Court 
of 1906, in the case before Judge Malone — a corporation that has obtained 
a franchise by whatever bribery, corruption, or ballot frauds, cannot have 
its right to that franchise legally contested in Colorado! 



. 



A CITY PILLAGED 251 

God, and to see Doherty and his associates 
smile upon this treason and this perjury? 
Doherty — the millionaire president of a score 
of power companies, rich, honoured, admired! 
Freuauff, the manager of the Denver Gas Com- 
pany, ex-treasurer of the Board of Deacons of 
the Central Presbyterian Church, an active relig- 
ious worker, a most "respectable" man! Wil- 
liams, chairman of a great party committee, 
ex-superintendent of a Sunday School in the Central 
Presbyterian Church ! Who may not be the victims 
of the Beast in your city when such men as 
these are its active agents in ours? 

Nor was this all. Months after the court 
investigations ended, Mr. Freuauff lost — or had 
stolen from him — some pages of the memo- 
randum book in w^hich he had kept an account 
of his briberies. Those pages were published 
in facsimile in Senator Patterson's paper, the 
Denver Times. They were in Freuauff's hand- 
writing and he never repudiated them. They 
showed that he had corrupted the political 
w r orkers of both parties in the franchise elec- 
tions, that he had bribed candidates of both 
parties, that he had paid Mayor Speer $4,500, 
had spent $3,551 on newspapers, had given 
$550 in church contributions, had paid Judge 
Gavin $400, the president of the Board of 
Supervisors $1,600, the State Oil Inspector 
$4,490, the Commissioner of Supplies $300, the 



252 THE BEAST 

City Clerk $200, "Len" Rogers $256, Soetje, 
an election commissioner, $200, Julius Aichele, 
former county clerk, $670 — and, in short, on 
the evidence of those five pages of memoranda, 
had used $67,690 to corrupt the guardians 
and sentries and officers of the public, so that 
the corporation banditti might find open gates 
and defenceless citizens when they came to 
pillage. 

Pillage? Rich and plenty! No free town of 
the Middle Ages, sacked by the robber barons 
and their retainers, ever paid such a ransom or 
yielded such a haul of loot. The income of the 
Denver City Tramway Company for the year 1908 
was more than three million dollars. If the com- 
pany paid for its franchises as the street railway 
does in Toronto, Canada (a city not much larger 
than Denver), the people of Denver would be re- 
ceiving, in concessions on fares and in actual cash 
paid for the use of their streets, more than a mil- 
lion dollars a year instead of a beggarly $60,000. 
(And it must be recalled that for this beggarly 
$60,000 the company has had its car taxes of 
$10,000 remitted!) If the citizens of Toronto paid 
the fares that the citizens of Denver do, their street 
car travel would have cost them $829,721 more 
in 1908 than it did. 

In a recent case in the Federal Court in Denver 
City Attorney Harry A. Lindsley — always the 
friend of the Beast — stipulated away to Mr. 



A CITY PILLAGED 253 

Charles J. Hughes, attorney for the tramway- 
company, valuable rights in a case involving the 
tramway franchise, so that the Federal Judge on 
the bench was compelled to concede the right of 
the tramway to a fifty-year franchise,* leaving still 
undetermined its further persistent claim to a 
perpetual franchise. If the Denver Tramway 
Company can continue to defend that illegal 
claim, its " rights" in the streets of Denver are 
worth $500,000,000, to put it modestly. The 
physical value of the tramway plant does not 
exceed $7,500,000. Its stocks and bonds aggre- 
gate about $21,000,000; an additional issue of 
$25,000,000 of bonds has recently been author- 
ized — of which $13,000,000 is to retire prior 
liens, etc. — and it is predicted in the brokers' 
offices that an old issue of $6,000,000 of stock 
wull be increased to $20,000,000 as soon as 
these liens have been retired. Loot! Beyond 
the dreams of all the thieves, highwaymen, 
pirates and gentlemen of fortune in the history 
of crime. 

The Denver Gas and Electric Company is 
earning sufficient to pay dividends of 20 per cent. 
It charges $1.00 a hundred for gas. And now 

*Our new Supreme Court, in December 1909, held flatly against this 
claim in " the Leadville sewer case." 

In the appeal of this case now pending in the Federal Court of Appeals 
(Jan., 1910) the special attorney for the city is Mr. N. Walter Dixon, who 
is also attorney for Mr. Evans, president of the tramway company, in 
private litigation! 



254 THE BEAST 

Doherty and Freuauff have announced a plan 
to reorganize with a bond issue of $25,000,000 
and "a stock reorganization at a later date." 
The amount of the stock issue depends, in the 
language of the railroad, upon how much the 
traffic will bear. 

The Denver Union Water Company, piping 
water into the city from the mountains, from 
great watersheds and water rights belonging to the 
people — and conceded to the company without 
any reservations to the people of their rights — 
charges three times as much for its service 
as the citizens of Boulder, for example, pay for 
theirs. Surely, as the frank Mr. Freeman, said, 
"the corporations give this state good govern- 
ment." They give us a government that is an 
outrage, and charge for it a price that is a robbery. 

It is a robbery, and duly declared so by the 
Supreme Court of the United States. That court, 
in the case of Wilcox vs. Consolidated Gas Com- 
pany (of New York City), decided that the rates 
charged by a public utility corporation must be 
sufficient to pay a reasonable return on the "prop- 
erty devoted to the public use" — not on the 
watered stock, not on the probable value of the 
franchise and the "good will" of the business, 
but on the valuation of the physical plant. It 
decided that a reasonable return in New York 
City for a gas plant is 6 per cent. Under this 
ruling — which is the law of the land — the Den- 



_ 



A CITY PILLAGED 255 

ver Gas and Electric Company should be charg- 
ing the citizens of Denver not more than 6 per 
cent, on the actual value of its plant instead of 
a sum that has yielded over 20 per cent, on 
stocks. The Tramway Company should be 
charging not more than 6 per cent, on $7,500,000, 
instead of seeking to extort from the people a suf- 
ficient sum to yield interest on $40,000,000. But 
of what avail is the law when the robbers so often 
control the officers and the courts that should 
enforce the law, and control them for the express 
purpose of preventing its enforcement ? Here is 
the secret of the Beast, its first cause and its final 
reason for being. It rules to rob. It must rule in 
order to rob. And as long as it rules, it will 
continue to rob. 

Mayor Speer, on the night before his last elec- 
tion, officially opened an electric fountain in City 
Park. A crowd of fifteen thousand people (of 
whom the tramway company had taken its usual 
toll) applauded the sky-high spurt of water glit- 
tering like fireworks in the glow of coloured lights ; 
and on all sides, when the first shouts of delight 
had subsided, there sounded the heartiest praises 
of Mayor Speer for what he w T as doing for Denver. 
He was reelected. Some day, let us hope, an 
electric fountain will be dedicated in City Park 
to the memory of that well-meaning and unfortu- 
nate County Treasurer who, when he found how 
his office had been corrupted at the time of the 



256 THE BEAST 

franchise steal, died of the disgrace. It should 
bear the inscription: "To the civic official of 
Denver who died of shame. Erected by the 
others who have only blushed themselves into 
insensibility." 

As the philosopher said: "There are times 
when one laughs that he may not weep!" 



— 



CHAPTER XV 

THE BEAST, THE CHURCH AND THE GOVERNORSHIP 

THE investigation of the franchise vote had 
had one hopeful issue: it proved that the 
corporation ballot-box stuffers were afraid of the 
teeth of our new registration law. Behind every 
vote that we counted there was a voter — although 
it was evident that at least a thousand of these had 
been "qualified" by fraud. The Supreme Court 
writ arrived in time to prevent us from investi- 
gating the fraud; and, by one of those suspicious 
strokes of luck that seem to happen only to the 
corporations, our very proof that the votes were 
not "phony" by wholesale, only redounded in 
the public mind to the greater profit of the Beast ! 
The Denver Republican celebrated the fact that 
the election had been probably "the cleanest 
held in Denver since it became a city." And 
it claimed the credit for itself and the Republican 
party. 

Said this official voice of the Beast, sweetly 
disguised: "It required an enormous amount of 
work to bring about this condition. It is a thing 
with which parties and courts grappled for years; 
it became necessary even to invoke the Legislature 

257 



258 THE BEAST 

and the Supreme Court to wrest from corrupters 
of the ballot the fruits of illegal victory/ ' 

Do not let your smile be cynical. "Hypocrisy 
is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. 55 There is 
still hope so long as the animal must wear its 
sheep's skin — so long as it recognizes that if the 
people knew it in its true stripes they would 
promptly cut its throat. I have that hope yet; 
and I had it very strongly in the campaign of 
exposure in which we were engaged throughout 
these years. It seemed to me only necessary for 
the people to "see the cat 55 in order to set them on 
it; and I continued, with all the power of my lungs, 
to "bawl out" the corporations and recite the list 
of their crimes. 

The corporations replied through the Board of 
County Commissioners by refusing to pay an 
outside judge for helping me in my court and by 
disallowing bills incurred in the work of the court 
by probation officers. During the five years that 
I had been in charge of the court, we had done 
more than twice as much work as any two courts 
in the history of the state, and we had done it for 
less than half the usual expense. In Indian- 
apolis, there were three judges and three courts 
doing the work of our one court in Denver. The 
judge and the clerks in our court had more than 
returned their salaries to the county in fees paid 
by litigants. Although the four ^district judges 
together had less work to do than I had, they were 



- 



THE GOVERNORSHIP 259 

continually calling in outside assistance and the 
County Board was paying for it. 

I appeared several times before the Board to 
ask for help, and I usually found in attendance, 
as the Board's confidential adviser, Mr. "Jim" 
Williams, the right-hand man in politics of "Bill" 
Evans and the tramway company. I was even, 
on one occasion, referred to Mr. Williams, by the 
County Attorney, for the answer to my plea that 
I should have help with my court work. I did 
not get the help — avowedly because I refused 
to allow the Board to appoint extra officers, w^hom 
I did not need, at a cost of about six thousand 
dollars a year to the county. 

One of the officers of the Democratic party of 
the City Hall came to me and said: "You ought 
to go and see Mr. Field, president of the tele- 
phone company. He's willing to help you out." 
I did not go, but, subsequently I accepted an 
invitation from a friendly county official to meet 
Mr. Field at luncheon, and I found him very 
suave and conciliatory, despite the fact that I 
had been publicly naming him, with Evans and 
Cheesman, as one of the corporation rulers 
of Denver. 

Mr. Field is a desiccated, small man who came 
to Colorado as a "lunger" and here regained his 
health. He was known in Denver, then (as he 
is now) to the politicians as "the brains of the 
System." Before I was talking to him very long 



260 THE BEAST 

I guessed that he had been deputed to "take me 
in hand," to try friendship and gentleness where 
force and enmity had failed. 

He blamed "Will/' as he called Evans, for 
having opposed me in 1904; and he said he 
remembered well the conferences between Evans, 
Cheesman and himself about my candidacy for 
a return to the County Court, and he confessed 
that they had played "poor politics" in oppos- 
ing me. He did not think, however, that I quite 
understood the gentle Will — who was "really a 
good man" and wanted to help me. They all 
wanted to help me. They all admired the work 
I was doing in the Juvenile Court. But they all 
felt I was mistaken in my charges against the 
corporations. 

However, he concluded by agreeing that I 
ought to have help in my court work and he 
promised that he would take the matter up "with 
Will" on the following Sunday, when he and 
Evans were to meet. He subsequently sent me 
a check for $250 toward the expenses of the 
Juvenile Improvement Association. Did I accept 
it ? I certainly did. Why ? For the same reason 
that I once accepted the aid of a woman in Den- 
ver who conducted a disorderly house. 

I sent for that poor creature, and an officer of 
my court brought her to my chambers. I took 
her by the hand, looked her in the face, and said: 
"Madam, I want to thank you for your good 



THE GOVERNORSHIP 261 

deeds and I want to tell you how I despise your 
evil ones. I accept the good you did, but I shall 
not shut my mouth about the evils of your busi- 
ness." She was a procuress, but her business 
was no worse than that of the corporations. She 
corrupted young girls; they corrupt whole com- 
munities. 

(A secretary of Mr. John D. Rockefeller once 
wrote me from New York to ask my views upon 
"tainted money." I replied with this story about 
the procuress. He did not send me a con- 
tribution, but if he had done so, I should have 
accepted it.) 

I did not receive any help from Mr. Field, but 
I had a visit from Mr. "Jim" Williams and found 
him very friendly. Mr. Gerald Hughes also 
came to tell me how mistaken I was in my enmity 
to Mr. Evans and how Evans had had nothing 
whatever to do with my "turndown" by the 
machine in 1904. (Gerald Hughes is the son 
of Chas. J. Hughes, Jr. He was counsel for 
Evans and the tramway company in the franchise 
investigation; and when his father became United 
States Senator from Colorado, the son nominally 
succeeded him as attorney of the tramway com- 
pany and its allies.) They were all very pleas- 
ant, and I enjoyed their tacit admission that they 
and their master, the gentle "Will," controlled 
the appointments in my court as absolutely as 
if I were a chief clerk in one of the tramway offices. 



262 THE BEAST 

But I made no promises; I accepted their ad- 
vances without being deceived by them; and 
finally I was informed by one of their agents : 
"There's nothing doing. They're still scared 
of you and Will isn't going to tell the Board to 
give you help yet." 

The fact that they were crippling the adminis- 
tration of justice in the community had no more 
weight with them than it would have had with 
any band of criminals. And they were not moved 
by the consideration that they were hampering 
us in the work for the children which they pro- 
fessed so much to admire! 

I tried to force the County Board's hand by 
"grand-standing" in an appeal to the public 
through my annual report, published in the 
Denver Post. But nothing came of it. I accused 
two of the County Commissioners, including the 
chairman, Mr. William Lawson, of committing 
the "crime of cheap graft and repeated perjury," 
but even that did not move them. I had to arrange 
to become personally liable for the salary of the 
judges whom I called in to help me, and it cost 
me hundreds of dollars. 

I relate all this merely to show "the cat" — 
and as a warning to any one who is ambitious to 
carry the banner of reform in his own state, that 
there are "other ways of killing a dog besides 
choking it with melted butter." I was almost 
dead from overwork. I realized that I could not 



mm 



THE GOVERNORSHIP 263 

go on as I had been ; my health would not permit 
it. And then I was galvanized into new activity 
by a confidential report that the Powers, at the 
next legislature, were going to divide the County 
Court from the Juvenile Court and "lose" me 
in the shuffle." That meant that I must watch 
the coming elections and use my influence for 
candidates who should help me in the "deal." 

They were state elections. Governor McDon- 
ald's term was to expire; so was Judge Gabbert's; 
and a United States Senator was to be elected 
as well as a new legislature. It was certain that 
Alva Adams, who had been defrauded of his 
election as Governor in 1904, would again be the 
Democratic candidate on a "vindication" plat- 
form; and it was common talk that Simon Gug- 
genheim, the head of the smelter trust, was to 
have the support of the corporations for, the 
United States senatorship. 

As far back as 1902, my name had been used 
in preelection gossip as that of a "dark-horse" 
candidate for the governorship ; and I have already 
related how the corporation Democrats had tried 
to bribe me, on more than one occasion, with the 
promise of their machine's support in obtaining 
the office. Por several years I had been receiving, 
from people all over the state, enthusiastic encour- 
agement to run as a reform Governor; and the 
newspapers had been continually prophesying my 
candidacy and predicting my success. All this 



264 THE BEAST 

was very flattering, but I knew — probably better 
than any one else — that whatever the people 
might wish, the corporations were united against 
me; and the corporations ruled. I knew, too, 
that my work in the Juvenile Court was as impor- 
tant as anything I could do as Governor, and I 
was not willing to give up my court until I had 
evolved an efficient legal procedure to promote its 
purposes and had firmly established it by law. 

In the early summer of 1906 there began to 
come to my desk hundreds of clippings from 
country newspapers and letters from friends, 
acquaintances and strangers, urging me to be a 
candidate for the governorship and promising to 
support me. The men with whom I had been 
working for the reform of the election laws saw 
an opportunity to carry our laws by electing 
me on a platform embodying them. Mr. Paul 
Thieman, of the Post, was particularly confident. 
And finally, in order to put a stop to plans that I 
considered hopeless, I wrote to Mr. Alva Adams, 
privately, and urged him to come out as the 
Democratic candidate, so that I might be relieved 
of the expectations of my well-wishers. 

I have made many mistakes in my life, but 
that was the most foolish. I had been fighting 
the Adams family for years, and I should have 
understood that there is no enduring virtue, as 
Mark Twain says, "in the good end of a bad 
banana.' * Frank Adams, as chairman of the 



THE GOVERNORSHIP 265 

Denver Police Board, had been the acknowledged 
agent of the Beast in controlling the saloons, 
dives and disorderly houses for political purposes ; 
and Senator "Billy" Adams had always been the 
crafty leader of the corporation agents in the 
Legislature. Alva Adams, however, had seemed 
to me a man of another stripe; he was the logical 
candidate, I thought, of the Democratic party; 
and, in any case, if he would announce his inten- 
tion of making the campaign, it would leave my 
friends without the support of any party for my 
name. 

Alva Adams replied that he would "rather 
take to the woods" than run again. I wrote a 
second letter, but it received no reply — except 
a newspaper interview with Adams saying that 
he would not be a candidate. His son, Alva 
Adams, Jr., came to my court and told Mr. Ger- 
ald Hughes and a number of politicians that his 
father did not intend to run and was favourable 
to my candidacy. I received similar assurances 
from other sources. 

This left me in greater uncertainty than ever. 
A labour leader of national reputation, passing 
through Denver, came to my house and advised 
my candidacy. He assured me that the labouring 
men would never support Adams; he was equally 
sure that they would support me. The whole 
state was up in protest against the rule of the 
corporations and their use of the Supreme Court, 



266 THE BEAST 

and the hour had come to lead a reform move- 
ment to success. He asked me what newspaper 
support I could count on. 

I told him that Senator Patterson's papers were 
calling on Adams to accept the Democratic 
nomination on a "vindication" issue, but that 
the Denver Post seemed favourable to me. We 
went to see Mr. Paul Thieman together, and 
Thieman was as enthusiastic as ever. I began 
to see visions and dream dreams of being able at 
last to attack the Beast with a united public 
opinion behind me — but I still hesitated. 

A few days later the Post endorsed me editorially 
as a candidate for Governor, and there was a 
flurry in the corporation camp. The paper was 
no more than on the streets before Mr. Field, as 
Thieman afterward told me, made a frantic 
effort to have the edition stopped and the paper's 
support reconsidered. But the Post had just 
lost in a fight with Evans about a public franchise 
deal, and the proprietors were eager for revenge. 
Their newspaper rivalry with Senator Patterson 
made them ambitious to defeat him as leader of 
the reform Democrats, by forcing my nomina- 
tion in spite of him. I found myself in the storm- 
centre of a small political cyclone. An inde- 
pendent body of Republicans in El Paso, Conejos 
and other counties offered me their support; the 
independents among the Democrats seemed all 
favourable; it began to be evident that if I could 



THE GOVERNORSHIP 267 

get the Democratic nomination, the success of 
our whole reform movement would be sure. 

And then, at the solicitation of Senator Patter- 
son, Alva Adams came to Denver and signed a 
written pledge — published in the Patterson news- 
papers — in which Adams declared he would 
accept the Democratic nomination, and salved 
his conscience by adding: "Judge Lindsey has 
a right to run for Governor if he wishes." 

Have you ever played politics with the Beast ? 
It is as puzzling as the "con" man's shell game 
— as bewildering as a masked ball — as diz- 
zying as a kaleidoscopic ballet danced in a trans- 
formation scene. I got my first clue to what 
was going on when one of Simon Guggenheim's 
personal friends explained to me: "I was out 
at a little party last night with Simon and he 
told me I could say to you that if you will only 
keep out of this race for Governor and let things 
progress so that Adams can be nominated, he 
will promise you anything you want in the next 
Legislature. He says he can guarantee it. He 
told me the deal is all shaped up with Evans, and 
Simon is to name enough candidates for the 
Legislature to give him absolute control. And by 
the way, he's going to nominate good men — 
men of good standing and not the ordinary cheap 
skates that usually go into the Colorado Legisla- 
ture. Of course they're going to make him 
United States Senator. He told me frankly that 



268 THE BEAST 

he thought you could be elected Governor if you 
were nominated, and he's satisfied that Adams 
can't be. This vindication issue is all rot. They 
are prepared to show how the Democrats have 
taken the money and accepted the help of the 
corporations when it was offered them and how 
they have stolen elections the same as the Repub- 
licans." And so forth. 

It was not news to me that Guggenheim was 
to have the senatorship. He made no secret of 
it himself. He had told Mr. John W. Springer 
that he intended to get it, even if it cost him a 
million ; and in an interview with Frederick Law- 
rence, published in Ridgway's Weekly, after the 
elections, he admitted that he had bought his 
place. 

But the part that Alva Adams was to play was 
matter for thought. I looked up his record as 
Governor and found that during his regime the 
corporations had fared better than they had under 
governors who were acknowledged corporation 
favourites. I recalled a conversation I had had 
with Field in which he said he had been one of 
Alva Adams's best friends and had obtained 
money for Adams's campaign fund, from the 
corporations, at Adams's request. It was, there- 
fore, no surprise to me when Adams, in the Demo- 
cratic convention, accepted, as the chairman of 
his campaign, Milton Smith, the corporation 
agent and attorney — and this on a platform that 



THE GOVERNORSHIP 269 

denounced the corruption of the Supreme Court, 
demanded the initiative and referendum, advo- 
cated the direct primary law and the election of 
United States senators by the vote of the people 
and denounced the rule of the corporations 
with all the eloquence of a new declaration 
of independence! 

I believed that Senator Patterson was honestly 
deceived; that he accepted Milton Smith in good 
faith. His paper, The Rocky Mountain News, 
has since said editorially: "If anything is clear 
in the political field of Colorado, it is that the 
Democracy cannot afford to have Smith in charge 
of its affairs. ... So long as he is at the head 
of the state organization, the reform promises of 
the Democratic party will be greeted with derisive 
jeers, and its denunciation of political corpora- 
tions will be a subject of mirth." This fact was 
as evident to me then as it is now. It was as 
evident to the independent Democrats. They 
advised me to stay in the fight and they circulated 
the petition to nominate me. They argued that 
Adams, carrying Milton Smith, was hopelessly 
out of the running and that thousands of both 
parties would vote for me and a legislative ticket 
to defeat Guggenheim. I went to El Paso County 
to help the independent Republicans fuse with 
the independent Democrats against the Guggen- 
heim outrage; and a committee was appointed 
in Denver to name an independent county and 



270 THE BEAST 

legislative ticket that was to be subject to my 
approval. 

But when this latter ticket was named I found 
it largely composed of Speer corporation Demo- 
crats. Mr. Fred. G. Bonfils, one of the pro- 
prietors of the Denver Post, (which was still 
supporting me) assured me that Speer and his 
city organization would aid me if I would agree 
to lend my name to this ticket. I received assur- 
ances of the same character from Mr. Speer 
himself. Mr. Solomon Schwayder, who had been 
in the law office of Chas. J. Hughes, came to my 
house twice and urged me to head this corpora- 
tion ticket, promising me Hughes's support, on the 
ground that Hughes would be the choice of my 
proposed legislators for the office of United States 
Senator! In short, the corporations being sure of 
Adams, now wished to make sure of me by tying 
me to the candidacy of a lot of corporation tools 
who would never allow us to obtain a reform law. 

I refused to lend my name to any such business, 
and I lost thereby the support of the Post and 
the Speer Democrats. I had already lost the 
Patterson papers and the Patterson Democrats 
by refusing to support Adams unless he repudi- 
ated his corporation chairman. There was now 
no longer the faintest hope that I could be elected 
Governor, and I felt rather relieved, but I still 
had the backing of some independent Republican 
organizations, and I endorsed the Democratic 



■HH^HH 



THE GOVERNORSHIP 271 

legislative candidates in the El Paso and Denver 
Districts in the hope that we might defeat 
Guggenheim, at least, by putting in a Demo- 
cratic legislature. 

Evans, meanwhile, had been casting about for 
a gubernatorial candidate to carry the corpora- 
tion flag in the Republican party. Mr. Philip 
Stewart, of Colorado Springs, had accepted the 
role and then revolted, after his nomination, when 
he found that he was to carry Judge Gabbert 
on his ticket. According to the newspapers of 
the day several other prominent men also declined 
the nomination. The situation was grave. Open 
public gambling in Denver and the progress of 
the Anti-saloon League had made a "moral issue" 
that threatened the hindquarters of the Beast. 
Churches and religious organizations all over the 
state were entering the campaign. It was neces- 
sary to have a candidate who should give respec- 
tability to corruption. 

Mr. Evans found his man in the Reverend 
Henry Augustus Buchtel, D. D., L.L. D., a min- 
ister of the Methodist Church, who was Chan- 
cellor of the Denver University! And after a 
harmony meeting at which Mr. Buchtel accepted 
the nomination, he invited Mr. Evans's emissaries 
to rise with him, join hands and sing "Blest Be 
the Tie That Binds"! 

The tie that binds the Beast and the Church ? 
Yes, and the Beast and the College! During 



272 THE BEAST 

the Peabody campaign (according to the Rocky 
Mountain News) a young student named Reed had 
been practically driven from the Denver University 
because he criticised the corporation Governor. 
Later a university professor was sent to Europe to 
gather data which was used in the campaign against 
municipal ownership in Denver; and the professor 
was "exposed but not forced into retirement." 
Later still, Buchtel reprimanded a student named 
Stanley Bell for volunteering as a worker in 
one of our Juvenile Court campaigns. Mr. Evans 
was president of the Board of Trustees of the 
University, and the Reverend Henry Augustus 
Buchtel was his Chancellor. 

The use of Buchtel in the campaign that fol- 
lowed was a huge success. Everywhere people 
said to me: "Why, the Chancellor will never 
stand for the sale of the senatorship to Guggen- 
heim !" Or the "dear chancellor" will never 
permit this or that undesirable thing in politics* 
But Buchtel had already admitted to a ministerial 
friend that he believed Guggenheim ought to be 
elected — though he said nothing of it from the 
platform, you may be sure. After he was Governor, 
he not only endorsed Guggeheim but vigorously 
defended the Legislature for electing Guggenheim, 
honoured Evans with a place on the gubernatorial 



*At that time I did not believe he would, wittingly. We were, and had 
been, the best of personal friends. It was not until later that I learned all 
the facts given here. B. B. L. 



THE GOVERNORSHIP 273 

staff, and gave a public dinner to the corporation 
heads who had most profited by the rule of the 
System in the state. They reciprocated by send- 
ing the Denver University handsome donations; 
Evans led with $10 ,000 , and Guggenheim, Hughes, 
and others followed wuth fat checks. 

The keeper of a gambling hell, whom I sum- 
moned to my court and forced to make restitution 
to one of his victims, said to me: "I have some 
respect for Mayor Speer. He tells these preachers 
that he believes in our policy of open gambling. 
But I have nothing but contempt for that old stiff 
up in the State House who talks about 'the word 
of God/ and gets his nomination from a boss who 
protects us, and gets elected on money that we 
contributed to the organization!" It is one of 
the saddest aspects of this use of the Church 
that the Beast gains respectability thereby, and 
the Church contempt. 

I yield to no man in my admiration for what 
"the church element " has done to fight the saloon 
and the gambling house and the brothel, in Den- 
ver. It was these good Christian people who 
conquered for us in all our earlier encounters 
with the "wine-room gang 55 and the political 
supporters of protected vice. It was they w T ho 
helped the women and children to save the 
Juvenile Court when the attempt was made to 
destroy it. They are the hope of society in every 
fight for public decency and moral reform. But 



274 THE BEAST 

in a community where the ''cohesive power of 
public plunder*' has united criminal corporations 
with criminal politicians and the criminal poor. 
has put the dive into alliance with the dishonest 
public official, the unjust court and the predatory 
millionaire — in such a community do you sup- 
pose that the churches by some miracle have 
escaped clean r I know that they have not. I know 
that the agents of the Beast have even dared 
to enter the house of God itself — to intimidate 
the minister — to cajole and deceive the con- 
gregation — and to use the religious organiza- 
tions of a Christian community to increase the 
vicious power of the System and to punish its 
opponents. And I shall tell how I know. 

I am well aware that what I am going to write 
will be quoted out of its context by the agents of 
the System and used by its newspapers to prove 
that I am an enemy of the religion in which I have 
been raised, and a traitor to the churches that 
have again and again saved me from political 
destruction. I can foresee, from my experience 
in the past, that when I attack the Beast where 
it hides behind the Church I shall be accused of 
attacking the Church — and so accused by the 
very agents of the Beast that I am attacking. 
But I hold that I should be a greater enemy of re- 
ligion, a more cowardly traitor to the Church, if I 
were to keep my peace about these enemies within 
the camp of righteousness, these traitors who are 



THE GOVERNORSHIP 275 

trying to betray the very pulpit to corruption, to 
pollute the altar of God as they have polluted 
the court of justice, and to use the churches for 
the same purpose that they have used the dives. 
When a petition was recently being circulated 
to renominate me as Judge of the Juvenile Court, 
a pastor of one of the most influential churches 
in Denver refused to sign the petition because 
I had "offended so many business men." "I 
can't come out publicly," he said. "I like Judge 
Lindsey. I think he is right. But we have to 
build." For the same reason a Denver prelate 
who was raising money to build a new church 
wrote to one of his clergy, who was making plat- 
form speeches on behalf of the Anti-saloon 
League, and ordered him to be silent. The Chris- 
tian Citizenship Union — during my last non- 
partisan and non-political campaign for the 
judgeship — endeavoured to obtain the use of 
a downtown church in which to hold an afternoon 
meeting in support of my candidacy, at which 
Father O'Ryan, Rabbi Kauvar and a number of 
other clergymen were to speak; no such church 
would allow them to hold the meeting under its 
roof. During this campaign, a meeting was to 
be held in a downtown Baptist Church, and 
permission to hold the meeting was revoked when 
it was learned that I was to speak; and the reason 
given for the refusal was the fact I was going to 
speak. At a time when practically every labour 



276 THE BEAST 

union in Denver had adopted resolutions endors- 
ing our work, a member of the Christian 
Citizenship Union went before an association 
of ministers and proposed that they, too, should 
endorse me; they silently declined to do so. The 
Citizenship Union had printed at its own expense 
a number of non-political circulars advocating 
my reelection on non-partisan grounds; the 
pastor of the Trinity Methodist Church refused 
to allow these circulars to be distributed to the 
congregation; and at the Central Presbyterian 
Church they had to be distributed on the side- 
walk before the doors. 

The young men of the Christian Citizenship 
Union were members of the Y. M. C. A. But 
an assistant secretary of the Y. M. C. A., during 
this same non-political campaign, told me frankly 
that I could not be allowed to speak from the 
platform of the Y. M. C. A. hall, because, he said, 
"We have to get our subscriptions from the 
business men to run the Association." And — 
to descend to an incident so petty that it can 
scarcely be believed — the officers of the Union 
had been asked by the members of the boy's 
department of the Y. M. C. A. to give them a 
portrait of me to hang in their meeting room, and 
they were informed that the Association refused to 
allow the picture to be hung. Now, I had been at 
one time chairman of a building committee of the 
Association, and had voluntarily resigned when I 



THE GOVERNORSHIP 277 

found that my chairmanship was an offence to 
the "interests" and hindered the work of raising 
money for the association. I had maintained 
my friendly relations with the young men of the 
Association ; and I do so still. The picture was 
in no way offensive. The photographer had 
done his best to make me handsome in it. If it 
w T as not a beautiful work of art, this perhaps 
was because, as Whistler said, the sitter was not 
a bewilderingly beautiful work of Nature. But 
it was not so hideously ugly that the objectors 
could not endure it. I shall never believe that! 
Never! The Beast is not so aesthetic! 

These young men of the Y. M. C. A. who are 
banded together as the Christian Citizenship 
Union, have done more for the enforcement of 
the laws and the maintenance of public decency 
in Denver than any other similar body of young 
men that I know of, in any city in the United 
States. I could say nothing too much in the way 
of grateful praise of them or of the Association 
that gave them their ideals. But what I wish to 
say is that even they found the influence of the 
Beast above them, met it in the management 
of the churches of which they were members, 
and were punished by it in the houses of business 
in which they worked — for two of them received 
their "notices 5 ' from their employers because 
they had been conspicuous in the work for reform. 

At a session of the Colorado Legislature in the 



278 THE BEAST 

spring of 1909, we were attempting to force the 
passage of a bill limiting the hours of work for 
women in laundries to eight hours a day. Revival 
meetings were then being held by "Gipsy" Smith 
in the Auditorium, and a resolution had been 
carried at one of his meetings endorsing the 
work of the Anti-saloon League. It was proposed, 
at a conference of the men and women interested 
in the laundry bill, that we should attempt to get 
a similar endorsement of our work to protect the 
unfortunate slaves of the laundry. And I was 
astonished to find that every one at the con- 
ference recognized the uselessness of such an 
attempt. Why? Well, it may be enlightening 
to notice — for example — that the Denver Gas 
and Electric Company had mounted upon the 
roof of its office building a huge electric sign 
advertising the revival meetings, and did not 
charge any rental for that aid to evangelism! 

Mr. Ray Stannard Baker, writing of "The 
Godlessness of New York," in the American 
Magazine, has pointed out: "The churches 
. . . are still dallying with symptoms: offer- 
ing classes and gymnasiums to people who are 
underfed and underpaid, who live in miserable 
and unsanitary homes. . . . They devote tre- 
mendous energy in attempting to suppress vaude- 
ville shows while hundreds of thousands of women 
and children in New York are being degraded, 
body and soul, by senseless exploitation — too 



THE GOVERNORSHIP 279 

much work, too small wages, poor homes, no 
amusement. They help the poor child and give 
no thought to the causes which have made him 
poor. They have no vision of social justice; 
they have no message for the common people." 

Is this the fault of the churches or of the powers 
that are trying to dominate the churches ? There 
are ministers in Denver — like Father Wm. O'Ryan, 
the Rev. A. H. Fish, D. H. Fouse, Frank T. 
Bayley, Frost Craft, Bayard Craig and Rabbi 
Kauvar — who have not only recognized that I 
was right in my charge that the corporations were 
corrupting our politics and exploiting our defence- 
less poor, but have dared to support me publicly 
in those charges. And I know, from more than 
one of these men, what influences were brought 
to bear to silence him and what authority he had 
to defy that he might continue to speak. The 
ministers are in the same position as the rest of 
us. They are allowed to do what they can — 
and they do much — to palliate the hardships of 
poverty and rescue the victims of economic w rong ; 
but as soon as they propose to attack the causes 
of some of the greatest hardships of poverty and 
attempt to alleviate the injustices of corporate 
greed, our masters speak. As long as the min- 
isters are content to dip the water out of a tub 
into which the faucet is still running, they are 
encouraged. But as soon as they attempt to turn 
off the faucet — to cure the cause instead of reliev- 



280 THE BEAST 

ing the result — the strong hand of the System is 
laid upon them. How can the churches have 
any "vision of social justice" and any "message 
for the common people" when the rulers of their 
congregations exist upon active social injustice 
to the common people ? We must be free of the 
Beast in our congregations before our ministers 
can be free. When the slave holder sat in the 
pew, there was no Abolitionist in the pulpit. 
Where the Beast is deacon, the minister is 
dumb! 



CHAPTER XVI 

HUNTING THE BEAST 

DID you ever hunt the sacred monkey among 
the Hindoos ? Have you been a revolu- 
tionist in Russia? Or were you an Abolitionist 
near the Mason and Dixon line before the war ? 
Well, did you ever make an anti-corporation 
campaign in a corporation-ridden community? 
It is an experience without which no man's public 
life can be said to be complete. No politician, 
till he has tried it, can truly boast, "I have lived !" 
My memories of my tour of Colorado in the 
autumn of 1906 I would not exchange for a copy 
of the best novel ever written, a seat for the most 
moving drama ever staged. 

In the first place, having repudiated the cor- 
poration candidates of both parties, I was free 
to speak the truth of them all. Having no 
expectations of being made Governor myself, 
I did not need to consider how my words 
would affect my own candidacy. Being a can- 
didate I was sure of a hearing, no matter what 
I said — thanks to our American courtesy in 
such cases. And having no party claque to sere- 
nade and applaud me, I could speak of things as 

281 



282 THE BEAST 

I knew them to people who were eager to see 
things as they are. 

When either of the other candidates arrived 
in a town, on his special train with his staff of 
politicians, he was received at the station by a 
committee, escorted to his meeting by a brass 
band, and introduced — with all the praises of a 
hired eloquence, from a platform crowded with 
"prominent citizens" — to a hall half filled with 
apathetic listeners who knew the whole proceeding 
was a lie. When I arrived in the town, I found 
at that same railroad station a few curious idlers 
who stared silently; I made my way to the hall 
as best I could. I found my platform empty even 
of a chairman, and in most cases introduced myself 
to a silent audience that packed the hall to the doors. 
But when, having paid my respects to both parties, 
I proceeded to explain how both were the tools 
and agents of the Beast, we did not miss the 
absence of the brass band. My fellow-slaves 
recognized the small voice of rebellion and greeted 
it with a shout. 

The "prominent" citizen would whisper to 
me afterward: "It's a shame you had to introduce 
yourself. I'm with you, but, you know, I can't 
come out openly. They'd simply salivate me." 
Personal friends, speaking under the voice, would 
congratulate me and add: "We wanted to have 
you down to dinner, but we didn't dare. You 
know how things are." In the towns where there 



wm 



HUNTING THE BEAST 283 

was an independent ticket that I could be on, 
there was no lack of reception and platform 
backing. And down at Montrose, in the fruit 
country, where the independent farmers did not 
depend upon the corporations for their bread and 
butter, the platform was as well filled as the body 
of the hall. But for the most part I was preach- 
ing a proscribed doctrine in a country where no one 

— under pain of a corporation interdict and 
excommunication — dared to give me any con- 
spicuous support. 

I do not write this pessimistically; for I knew, 
then, that the people were with me, and I know, 
now, that not a word of what I said was lost. 
Many thousands voted for me, even though they 
knew their votes would be thrown away. And 
our exposure of the political conditions and our 
explanation of their cure through a reform of the 
election laws — however clumsy, however feeble 

— started a demand for reform in Colorado that 
has not been stilled yet and cannot be stilled ever, 
until it has been granted. Therein lies the virtue 
of such apparent Quixotism. That is the eternal 
weakness of the Beast. It can only rule through 
fear. Let but one man in your community defy 
it, and the revolt of thousands has begun. The 
days of the Beast in Colorado are numbered. 
It is masking itself now in one disguise, now in 
another — this year as one party, next year as 
another — but the people have seen it ; they are 



284 THE BEAST 

beginning to track it down, through every devious 
winding, in all sorts of unsuspected lairs. It 
cannot "fool all the people all the time." We 
shall get it yet. 

During the governorship campaign it even 
stole a "Lindsey" ticket to hide its stripes in 
El Paso County, and put up for election, under 
my name, a gang of corporation candidates who 
would oppose to the last breath the passage of any 
of the reform laws that I was advocating. I 
appealed to the court in Colorado Springs, and 
an outside judge, named Armour, was called in 
to hear the case. 

(It is an old trick of the Beast to bring a 
judge from one county to decide its suits in 
another. By this means an outraged public 
cannot bring its anger to bear upon the traitor 
to its interests!) 

Judge Armour at first expressed some sympathy 
with our indignation at the theft of my name, but 
he had a change of heart over night, and in an 
outrageous decision he finally ruled against us. 
We took the case to Denver, to the Supreme Court 
— which, under the statute of the state, has the 
right to hear such election cases, at its discretion. 
The Supreme Court decided not to hear it, on 
the ground that there was not time to do so before 
the elections. Consequently, we had to change 
the designation of our ticket in El Paso County, 
but we had no time to explain the fraud to the 



HUNTING THE BEAST 285 

electorate, and we lost several thousand votes 
through the confusion of the ballot and the despair 
of our supporters. 

Then in Denver, where we threatened the 
Guggenheim "deal" by endorsing a reform ticket 
of Democratic candidates for the Legislature — 
after they had pledged themselves in writing 
to support our election laws — another trick was 
played on us. On a Saturday, ten days before 
election day, our nominations were taken to the 
office of the Secretary of State to be filed, before 
five o'clock in the afternoon. The office, always 
open at such times until midnight, was found 
locked. The Secretary of State was not at 
his home. We heard that he was leaving the 
city, and a messenger intercepted him with the 
papers at the railroad station and forced him to 
accept them. That was ten days before, the 
elections, and {lie law required that the papers 
should be filed eight days before election day. 

The Secretary of State wrote us on Monday 
that since his office had not been reopened until 
Monday, the eighth day, the nominations could 
not be accepted. We obtained a mandamus from 
Judge Mullins ordering him to accept them. 
Guggenheim's campaign manager obtained an 
order from Judge Peter L. Palmer to the contrary 
effect. The dispute was carried to the Supreme 
Court — the same court that had decided, a week 
previous, that it was too late to hear election cases. 



286 THE BEAST 

And the Supreme Court justices not only heard 
it, but — with Justice Steele and Gunter dis- 
senting — they reversed Judge Mullins's decision, 
and ruled that our nominations had not been 
filed in time and could not be printed on the ballots. 

I shall never forget that hearing. It was held 
in chambers, informally. The seven judges sat 
around a table at their ease, in a private room 
carpeted and quiet. I appealed to them for justice 
— my own counsel — hoarse with the fatigue of a 
campaign that had worn me out. I was so weak 
that for the first and only time in my life, I wept 
before a court. Five of the seven listened as if they 
had been the Grand Inquisition and I a heretic who 
must be exterminated. I saw their decision in their 
faces, and the blood went to my head. I turned and 
hurried out of the room lest I should reach across 
the table and seize one of those men by the throat. 

Fortunately such emotions do not endure. (If 
they did, life for some of us in Colorado would be a 
poisoned rage.) Crippled in my campaign by hav- 
ing my name stolen from me in El Paso County 
and our ticket refused in Denver — continually 
recalled from the platform in one town to defend 
myself before the courts in another — without a 
campaign fund to defray even legitimate expenses, 
and with no organization except in the few places 
where there was an independent movement to 
aid us — we came to election day with the cer- 
tainty that our independent fight would prove 



» 



HUNTING THE BEAST 287 

itself the greatest failure in the history of the state. 
We had no watchers at the polls in Denver. One 
of the Democratic watchers in a polling place 
near the Court House, after the elections, 
offered to take his oath for me that, of 83 votes 
cast for me in his district, 40 were counted for 
Buchtel, 40 for Adams, and 3 for myself! But 
even so, on the face of the returns, we polled the 
largest vote ever counted in the state for an inde- 
pendent candidate. Had we been able to elect the 
representatives from the El Paso and Denver 
districts — whom the courts had prevented us from 
endorsing — the defeat of Guggenheim would have 
been certain, and the object of our campaign 
attained. Buchtel ran nearly ten thousand votes 
behind his ticket, and Adams only two thousand 
behind his; we cut into Buchtel's vote almost five 
times as much as into Adams's. 

Buchtel was elected. His candidacy proved a 
successful disguise for the Guggenheim "deal," 
and the "church element" was used as well as 
" the dive element." A corporation legislature was 
put in power. It only remained for the corpora- 
tions to deliver the United States senatorship to 
Simon Guggenheim "for value received," and to 
betray the nation as they had betrayed the state. 

Simon Guggenheim had no more claim to 
represent Colorado in the Senate at Washington 
than John D. Rockefeller has — or Baron Roths- 
child. He was the head of the Smelter Trust, 



288 THE BEAST 

and he had been financially interested, of course, 
in the election of Peabody in 1904, and the defeat 
of the eight-hour law and the suppression of the 
eight-hour strike. These things entitled him to 
the gratitude of the corporations only. He was 
unknown to the people of Colorado. He had 
never been seen by them except in a picture. He 
had never been heard by them except in a news- 
paper interview. He had not, as far as I know, 
ever spoken or written a word publicly on pol- 
itics. "I don't know much about the political 
game," he told one of his campaign managers, 
"but I have the money. I know that game." 
He does. 

During this contest, a young man whom I 
knew — ambitious to be a state senator — was 
summoned to the tramway company's Majestic 
Building and was promised a nomination on 
condition that he pledge his vote for Guggen- 
heim. He refused, and he was not nominated. 
Another, of similar aspirations but less strength, 
after denouncing the proposed sale of the 
senatorship to Guggenheim (at a public meet- 
ing of young reformers) accepted a nomination 
from the Republicans, and explained to his reform 
friends, after his election, that he had to sell him- 
self in order to "get anywhere." He voted for 
Guggenheim, and he became one of the most 
efficient tools of the corporations in the House. 
Boss Evans had controlled the Republican con- 



HUNTING THE BEAST 289 

ventions, and resolutions had been passed pro- 
viding that all members of the Legislature in voting 
for candidates for the United States senatorship 
should be bound by the caucus — that is to say, 
should be bound by the corporations to vote for 
Guggenheim. Many of the legislators, thus 
sold and delivered, did not get money for the 
prostitution of their manhood. One of them, 
whom I knew, was an insurance agent, and he 
received a big insurance policy from which his 
fees were large. Another, a young lawyer, had been 
paid in corporation cases to prosecute or defend; 
he had received, in the course of a few months, thou- 
sands of dollars in fees ; and he had received them 
through the boss who had helped to buy 
Gardener. This same young lawyer had come 
to me, after his election, like a man who had 
made a bargain with the devil, full of abhorrence 
for the betrayal of public trust that was now 
demanded of him. I counselled him rather to 
resign than to sell himself. He had not the 
strength. He voted for Guggenheim, and he is 
now one of the most notorious corporation advo- 
cates in the Legislature. Others received fees, cor- 
poration business, or political favours and rewards 
of various sorts. The corporation Democrats joined 
the corporation Republicans in supporting Gug- 
genheim. (At the Democratic Club during the 
election campaign, Mr. Gerald Hughes, son 
of Chas. J. Hughes, attorney for the tramway 



290 THE BEAST 

company, had made a speech in support of the 
Evans-Guggenheim Republican candidates; and 
the corporation Democratic machine had openly 
supported that ticket.) Guggenheim received his 
senatorship. * 

Do you suppose that he is the only member of 
the Senate in Washington who has been so elec- 
ted ? Do you suppose that senators, so elected, 
represent any one in the councils of the nation 
except the powers that put them there ? Whether 
these men be called Republicans or Democrats, 
do you think their votes are cast for any law, any 
tariff, any reform that will hurt "the interests " 
whom they represent ? If you do, you do not know 
the Beast. It is not only Denver that lies 
beneath its paw. It is not only Colorado. It is 
this whole nation. The System controls the 
machinery by which we elect our national repre- 
sentatives as well as our state and city representa- 
tives. It picks the same sort of legislators to rule in 
the Capitol at Washington that it picks to rule in 
the Capitol at Denver. The men so elected give 
to the nation the same sort of government that they 
give to our state. And our fight in Denver is not 
a fight to free Denver alone — nor to free Colorado 
alone — but to help free the whole nation, and to 
reestablish a free government of a free people in a 



*Only two Republician members of the Legislature voted against Guggen- 
heim: Hon. Merle Vincent in the House and Hon. Morton Alexander in 
the Senate. Both were defeated for renomination at the next election, 



HUNTING THE BEAST 291 

country that shall be free. It was for this we 
fought in 1906. It is for this that we are fighting 
still. 

Our fight in 1906 had some disastrous results 
for me. We offended the blindly loyal party men 
among the Democrats as among the Republicans, 
and I lost the support of all the party newspapers. 
Senator Patterson's organs did not at once forgive 
my campaign against Adams. The Denver 
Republican treated me as an irreconcilable enemy 
of the corporations. And the Denver Post, having 
failed to tie me to a corporation Democratic ticket, 
turned to Buchtel and Evans, and enlisted under 
that black flag which it has served and fought for, 
ever since — with occasional independent forays 
after loot of its own! 

This is not as small a matter as it may seem. 
It has been my experience that there are no agents 
of reform as powerful in our American communi- 
ties as the newspapers. They are the very eyes 
of the people. What they refuse to see, it is almost 
impossible to discover to the public. What they 
desire to see wrongly, it is almost impossible to show 
in its true face. And this is well known to the 
Beast. It not only uses the editorial pages: it 
applies its influence to the reports of the news 
columns; it supplements editorial arguments and 
abuse, with misrepresentations, with falsifications, 
and with downright inventions in the reporters' 
room. 



292 THE BEAST 

For example: A complaint was made in my 
court, by the Humane Society, against a woman 
who was drunk and ill-treating her children. A 
Deputy Sheriff arrested her and put her in the 
county jail, at the request of the neighbours, "to 
sleep off her drunk''; and they agreed to take care 
of the children. One of the "interests" news- 
papers, on its front page, headed the story something 
like this : " Juvenile Judge sends poor washerwoman 
to jail, while six children starve. Kind-hearted 
neighbours take care of children separated from 
mother who languishes in jail." The reporter 
who wrote the story came to my chambers and 
explained: "Judge, I'm sorry about that article, 
but it wasn't my fault. The city editor told me 
I had to find something to roast you about, and I 
sent in that story — but it wasn't so bad when I 
finished with it. A lot of things were added, 
after I turned it in." 

Or again: An Italian labourer, charged with 
neglecting his wife and encouraging his children 
to steal from the railroad tracks, came to my 
court drunk and used such vile language that I 
sentenced him to jail for thirty days for contempt 
of court. I suspended twenty-nine days of the 
sentence without telling him so, and next day — 
which was Sunday — I sent an order for his 
release, had him brought to my home and gave 
him a friendly lecture. He apologized, and — 
after the fashion of his people — he kissed my 



warn 



HUNTING THE BEAST 293 

hand before he went away, promising to attend 
to his work and look after his family. (And the 
court officers afterward reported that he kept 
his promise.) Some days later, a newspaper 
printed a sensational account of how I had 
taken a poor Italian from his home where his 
family was starving, and sentenced him to 
thirty days solitary confinement in the county 
jail because his children had picked up a few 
cents 5 worth of coal from the railroad tracks. 
The article was headed: "A Jeffreys on the 
Bench." 

Whenever a boy who had been put on probation 
in my court was arrested for a second offence, the 
"kept" newspapers joined in an attack on the 
probation system, accused us of encouraging 
young criminals, and advocated the abolition of 
the Juvenile Court. Such an attack was made 
on us, once, because two of our boys had been 
rearrested ; and a railroad police officer (Mr. E. D. 
Hegg) in no way connected with our court, wrote to 
me that these boys were two out of 103 boys who had 
been before us from the district, and the 101 others 
had never backslided. Such misrepresentations, 
repeated and repeated for years, seriously hurt 
our work for the children. They seriously im- 
paired the public credit of our court — and that 
is what they w r ere designed to do. The Beast 
was preparing to "get" me at last; having driven 
me back upon the County Court with no political 



294 THE BEAST 

support and no newspaper to defend me, it was 
trying to alienate the sympathies of the independ- 
ent voters so that when my next election should 
come I might not have even the " sentiment 5 ' of 
the non-partisan citizens to rely on. 

My term would expire in the autumn of 1908. 
But in the spring of 1908 the city elections would 
have to be held. As judge of the County Court 
I would have power to hear all contests arising 
from those elections; and in order to get me off 
the county bench the Legislature in the spring of 
1907 took up the "deal" — of which I had already 
been warned — to divide the Juvenile from the 
County Court by legislative enactment, and "lose" 
me in the division. Having failed in our attempt 
to elect any reformers to the House, I was left to 
face this "deal" without a friend among the 
legislators to defend me. 

Mr. Geo. S. Redd was the man deputed to take 
the matter in hand. He was a cousin of George 
Stidger, who was then District Attorney, and he 
had been Stidger's law partner. He was a mem- 
ber of the Methodist Church, had been put 
on the legislative ticket by Evans, and had 
voted for Guggenheim. But he was not the 
sort of man that you might suppose from these 
antecedents. "Judge," he said, when he came 
to talk with me about the bill to divide the court, 
"I'm friendly to you. I believe in your work and 
I will tell you, now, that while I'm to introduce 



fcMHM 



HUNTING THE BEAST 295 

the bill, I'll do all I can to make it satisfactory 
to you." And he did. 

I proceeded to draft a bill that would be satis- 
factory to me. District Attorney Stidger drafted 
one that was satisfactory to the System. I gave 
the Juvenile Court jurisdiction in all cases against 
minors and in all cases in which the protection 
of minors was involved, gave the probation officers 
complete police powers and gave the court the 
right to arrest and punish adults guilty of con- 
tributing to the delinquency of minors. Mr. 
Stidger took away from the Juvenile Court officers 
the power to file petitions in children's cases, denied 
the probation officers any police powers, and 
made the Juvenile Court an impotent little police 
court for children. In the House, Mr. Wilbur 
F. Cannon (the same Cannon who murdered 
our insurance bill so many years before) amended 
Stidger's bill so as to give the County Commis- 
sioners the power to appoint all the probation 
officers, the superintendent of the Detention 
School and so forth, so that, even though I remained 
judge, the court officers would belong to the System. 
I simply served notice on Mr. Redd that I would 
not accept the judgeship of any such court, that 
I would remain in charge of the County Court — 
knowing that this was exactly what they were 
dividing the court to prevent. 

After some irritated conferences, they agreed 
that I should have the right to appoint my own 



296 THE BEAST 

court officers, but they still refused to allow the 
probation officers police powers and refused the 
court the right to try the gamblers and dive 
keepers who debauched girls and boys. District 
Attorney Stidger was very frank in his explanation 
of why I could not have this power. It would 
hurt the System. Pacing up and down his office, 
with the door shut, he spoke for the Beast 
and announced the ultimatum of the Beast. 
I was to be given a court in which I might try the 
cases presented to me by the System, but I was 
not to have a court that should give me any power 
to interfere with the System, by prosecuting those 
agents of vice who were protected by the System. 

We kept up these quarrels and conferences 
until within a few days of the close of the legisla- 
tive session, and then I served notice again that 
unless I were given a Juvenile Court with teeth, 
I should remain on the county bench. Stidger 
and my old law partner, Senator Gardener, 
finally compromised by accepting an amendment 
to their bill — an amendment providing that the 
Juvenile Court should have coordinate juris- 
diction with the District Court in all criminal 
cases in which minors were involved and against 
all persons who violated laws for the protection 
of minors. Senator Gardener introduced this 
amendment in the Senate and had it passed. 

This was all very well, but I had no proof that 
the amendment had passed the Lower House. In 



HUNTING THE BEAST 297 

fact the Clerk's record showed that it had not 
passed the Lower House. I do not wish, here, to 
charge that there was a conspiracy to betray me 
— although one of the newspapers at the time 
freely made that charge. But I had been warned 
that there was a plot to get me into the Juvenile 
Court and then "pull out the slats" from under 
me; and I refused to accept the Court unless I 
had proof that Gardener's amendment had passed 
the House also — for, without that proof, the 
"slats" would be loose. I got the proof. I was 
given a transcript of the records, signed by the 
Secretary of State, the Clerk and other officials 
showing that the Juvenile Court Bill and the 
amendment thereto had passed both the House 
and the Senate! That transcript nailed down 
"the slats" — for the Supreme Court of Colorado 
has held that you cannot go behind the legislative 
records even if you have extrinsic evidence to show 
that they are wrong. 

I accepted the judgeship of the new special 
Juvenile Court in July, 1907, with all the powers to 
protect children that I had had in the County Court 
for seven years, but of course with no pow r er any 
longer to interfere with the System in election cases 
or to try adults for any offences in which the rights 
of minors were not involved. We have succeeded 
in getting from the Legislature laws that give the 
Juvenile Court not only power to go over the 
heads of the police in children's cases — so as to 



298 THE BEAST 

arrest offenders whom the System may wish to 
protect — but power also to act independently 
of the District Attorney in children's cases and 
to file complaints against offenders whom the 
District Attorney might wish to protect. It is 
true the Legislature did not seem to know it was 
passing such a law, but there it is ! There are ways 
of getting the best of the Beast legitimately and 
honourably without beating the tom-toms of public 
clamour. When the newspapers refused to help us 
with our " grand-standing, " we found a way to do 
some still-hunting after night, horribly disguised. 



K^^—^^MM 



CHAPTER XVII 

A VICTORY AT LAST 

I COME, now, to the last chapter of this story 
of the Beast; but I come to it, in the 
reminiscence — thank heaven ! — with a lighter 
heart than any of us had when we faced it in the 
fact. As the result of seven years of almost fran- 
tic agitation for legislative reform, we had gained 
— an effective registration law! Nothing more! 
In all our fights to obtain an honest charter for 
Denver, to prevent dishonest elections, to protect 
the city from the theft of its franchises, to defend 
the poor from exploitation and to check the corpo- 
rations in their abuse of the courts, w^e had failed. 
We had founded, it is true, a Juvenile Court with 
laws that protected the children from the agents 
of the System ; but we had gained no election law 
that would protect the court itself; and we were 
continually assured by the agents of the Beast 
that they would "get" that court yet. Gover- 
nor Buchtel had gone about the country, in the 
summer of 1907, on a Chautauqua lecture tour, 
heralding himself as the man who had been called 
upon to "guide Colorado from the verge of polit- 
ical anarchy," and incidentally defending Gug« 

£99 



300 THE BEAST 

genheim and the corporations that had elected 
him. The Denver Chamber of Commerce had 
passed a resolution declaring me an enemy of the 
state, because a false news despatch reported me 
as saying, in a public lecture in the East, that 
Guggenheim ought to be hanged if we hanged 
Orchard ; and the members of the Chamber passed 
their resolution, although many of them afterward 
admitted to me that they thought I was "right" 
in my attacks on the corporations and their Sena- 
tor. ("You told the truth/' they would assure 
me, privately, "but, you know, it hurts business 
to tell it — it hurts the prosperity of the state.") 
The Denver Post followed the resolution with a 
demand that I be driven from town, and stirred 
up all possible enmity against me as a "defamer" 
of my state. In the city elections of the spring of 
1908, the Anti-saloon League and the "church 
element" tried to elect a mayoralty candidate in 
opposition to Mayor Speer and the "dive ele- 
ment"; but the corporations, represented by 
Boss Evans, betrayed the League while pretend- 
ing to support it, and Speer was triumphantly 
reelected by the Beast. We were all dis- 
couraged. I knew that I was regarded as hope- 
lessly "discredited." I knew that the men whom 
I had fought believed that the public was tired of 
our crusading — for there is nothing more weari- 
some to a Western community than a "professional 
kicker." Men would come to my chambers and 



A VICTORY AT LAST 301 

say: "Ben, what's the use? You're only but- 
ing your head into a stone wall. Why don't you 
settle down to some sort of peace and comfort ? 
If the people want their state run this way, let 
them have it." 

The trouble was that I did not believe the people 
knew how their state was run. I was determined 
that they should know, if I could tell them. And 
I went into the campaign for the judgeship, in the 
autumn of 1908 — as I had gone into that for 
the governorship in 1906 — w 7 ith the single and 
forlorn purpose of making it a "campaign of 
education." 

It was probable that I should be unable to get 
a nomination from either party, and we had first 
to consider the possibility of making an inde- 
pendent campaign ; and we came to the immediate 
conclusion that there was no possibility of me 
succeeding as an independent. During the county 
elections of 1906, a strong organization of promi- 
nent citizens had nominated a number of inde- 
pendent candidates for the judiciary, in an attempt 
to free the courts from the influence of the corpora- 
tion machine; the independent ticket had been 
supported by a large campaign fund and an 
efficient organization; the candidates were men 
well known to the community for their honesty 
and public spirit ; yet those candidates who did not 
also get a nomination on a party ticket received 
less than 3,000 votes out of about 60,000 cast. 



302 THE BEAST 

This result was pointed out to me, by the men 
who had conducted the campaign, when I con- 
sulted with them upon my own candidacy. They 
conceded that 90 per cent, of the people of 
Denver wished me to continue in charge of the 
Juvenile Court, but they believed — as I did — 
that with the straight-ticket ballot to vote on, not 
5 per cent, would vote for me. 

You see, the ballot used in Colorado is par- 
ticularly designed to discourage " scratching' ' for 
independent candidates. If, for instance, I were 
running as an independent for a district judge- 
ship, and a Democrat wished to vote for me, he 
would have to write " Democratic' ' in the blank 
space at the top of his ballot, put an X after my 
name, and run a line through the name of the 
opposing candidate on the Democratic ticket. 
If he did not run a line through the name of my 
Democratic opponent — although he put the X 
after my name — his vote would be counted for 
the Democrat. But if I were running independent 
for a place as County Judge or Juvenile Judge, 
the procedure was different. In that case, after 
writing "Democratic" at the top of his ballot, 
he would have to put his X after my name and 
carefully refrain from running a line through the 
name of my Democratic opponent. If he did run 
that line through the name of the Democrat, it 
was a mutilation of the ballot. These techni- 
calities are always made more confusing by the 



A VICTORY AT LAST 303 

party workers, who purposely give conflicting 
advice to the voter in order to mislead and intimi- 
date him. The party newspapers play upon his 
fears by warning him that^if he tries to "scratch" 
he will surely mutilate his ballot and lose his vote. 
And the party men, who act as election judges, 
in counting the votes take advantage of their 
opportunity to count scratched ballots very much 
as they please. 

"Judge," a ward politician named Billy Arnett 
said to me, "unless you can get on one of the 
straight tickets, it doesn't matter if all the people 
in Denver are for you ; you'll have no more chance 
than a snowball in hell. The people don't know 
how to scratch. They're scared to try it. 
And they won't try it; they know indepen- 
dents have no chance and they don't want to 
throw away their votes." My friends warned 
me that if I ran independent, I would be giving 
the corporation machine the very opportunity it 
was eager for. I would get only two or three 
thousand votes, and the word would go out from 
Denver that I was so discredited that the people 
of Denver had refused to reelect me. 

Well then, could I get a party nomination? 
That was the next question. And it was at once 
evident that I could not get one through favour. 
My independent campaign for the governorship 
had piqued the leaders of both parties. Friends 
who had helped me in the Republican convention 



304 THE BEAST 

of four years before — men like E. P. Costigan, 
J. H. Causey, and J. C. Starkweather — were 
now marked men, "spotted" by the Beast; 
they could not even get credentials to a conven- 
tion, much less raise a revolt in one. Many 
well-meaning men and women who had fought 
for me in 1904 — because of a sentiment of 
admiration for the Juvenile Court — had since 
been intimidated by the opposition of "business" 
and the Beast. I was no longer fighting the 
petty grafters ; I had raised more powerful enemies ; 
and a sentimental following of kindly disposed 
people w^ould not be daring enough, I knew, to 
force me upon an unwilling political machine. 
There w T as one hope left. One of these two 
parties, at the last minute, might feel the need of 
having my name as an asset to a corporation ticket. 
I was not willing that my name should be so used, 
unless I could make it plain to the voters that I 
was not a sympathetic member of the company 
in which I was to be put. For this reason I pub- 
lished, in August, 1908, a pamphlet called "The 
Rule of the Plutocracy," in which I tried to set 
forth, in a brief form — with the aid of Ellis 
Meredith, an experienced writer — the facts which 
I have detailed here in these present articles. I 
issued 30,000 copies, at my own expense, with 
the money I had earned on a lecture tour; and I 
had thousands of copies delivered to the homes of 
voters in Denver. 



A VICTORY AT LAST 305 

A month later the conventions met. There was 
a factional fight in the Democratic organization ; and 
at the preliminary caucus my name was included on 
the "slate." But before the convention met, Mr. 
Gerald Hughes, son of Charles J. Hughes, the 
attorney for the tramway company, interfered 
with the arrangement; the slate w r as altered; and 
Earl Hewitt, Boss Speer's "man Friday," nomi- 
nated as Juvenile Judge a police magistrate who 
was one of the ward politicians. In order to put 
the machine on record, I proposed to one or two 
young Democrats, whom I had befriended, that 
they should try to nominate me in the convention, 
but they replied that such an act would mean 
their political ruin, and I did not press them 
further. My name was not mentioned in the 
convention. To several delegates who made 
bold to ask Gerald Hughes why I was not 
on the ticket, Mr. Hughes replied, "Because 
he has attacked our best friends — men like Mr. 
Evans." 

I had a friend in the Republican caucus, and 
he said it would be good policy for the party to 
nominate me; but the caucus did not, and he 
admitted that it was because the politicians were 
afraid of the corporations. They nominated a 
man named Howze, who, after the elections, tried 
to collect a fund to fight some of our laws for the 
protection of children, on the ground that they 
were unconstitutional ! 



306 THE BEAST 

There was nothing for us now but an inde- 
pendent campaign. We tried to raise a campaign 
fund. My friends went first among the business 
men — and found their pockets buttoned. All 
our efforts ended in raising only $450. The 
business men said that I was "the man for the 
place/' but that I was foolish to attack the cor- 
porations, and that it was dangerous for a man of 
business to support me. For the same reason, 
many of them refused even to sign a petition to 
nominate me. 

I then tried the ministers. I sent a letter to 
every preacher in Denver — about one hundred 
and fifty in all — explaining my difficulties and 
asking them to meet me in the Juvenile Court on 
an appointed evening. Four or five sent letters 
of regret. Two or three came to the meeting. 
The others were silent. Later the young men 
of the Christian Citizenship Union sent a sim- 
ilar letter to the ministers, through their presi- 
dent, Mr. Harry G. Fisher. The same ministers 
came ! 

I talked to a number of school teachers who 
came to my chambers privately to promise me 
their support. They told me that many teachers 
were eager to help, but dared not make them- 
selves conspicuous because it was known that the 
First National Bank and the Moffat-Evans-Chees- 
man interests controlled the School Board; and 
the teachers were afraid of losing their positions. 



A VICTORY AT LAST 307 

I tried the leaders of the Woman's Club. One 
able and wealthy woman, of whose support I was 
certain, confessed that she could not even sign 
my nominating petition. She said that if any 
woman of wealth wished to take part in such a 
fight, she would have to invest her money in 
another state. Her own investments were in 
Denver, and if she were to champion our cause 
publicly, the corporations would make her suffer 
for it ruinously. Another leader told me: "You 
know, Judge Lindsey, I would like to help you, 
but my husband is in business, and his business 
depends largely upon the good will of Mr. Evans. 
He has large contracts with the county. He has 
told me that I must not under any conditions 
attend your meetings or do anything like that. 
It would be very offensive to Mr. Evans and the 
business men." Another said: "I know you're 
right, Judge, but my husband is in the City 
Hall. Some day I hope he will be free — so 
that I may be free — but he isn't now." I went 
at the beginning of the campaign to practically all 
the women's suffrage leaders who, at national 
meetings, had been telling how much the women 
had done for the Juvenile Court in Denver; and 
none of them dared help me. Women like 
Mrs. Mary C. Bradford and Mrs. Lafferty (who 
was a member of the last Legislature) took the 
platform against me and supported the System 
in its attempt to "get" the Juvenile Court. Mrs. 



308 THE BEAST 

Scott Saxton of the Woman's Club stood practi- 
cally alone in her open public support of our anti- 
corporation campaign. 

Beauty and the Beast! I am, and have 
always been, an enthusiastic advocate of woman's 
suffrage. In our Juvenile Court campaigns, the 
women, like the "church element," have given us a 
loyal and victorious support. But if any one 
believes that woman suffrage is a panacea for all the 
evils of political life, he does not know what those 
evils are. The women are as free of the power of 
the Beast as the men are — and no freer. 
Their clubs in Denver have not dared offend it 
any more than the churches have. In a typical 
American community such as ours, where the Beast 
rules, the women are as helpless as the rest of us. 
They are bound by the same bread-and-butter con- 
siderations as the rest of us. Their leaders in politics 
are politicians; when they get their nominations 
from the corporation machines, they do the work of 
the corporations, and there is almost no way, under 
the Beast, to get a party nomination except 
from a corporation machine. Women in poli- 
tics are human beings; they are not "ministering 
angels" of an ethereal ideality; and they are 
unable to free us, because they are not free them- 
selves. 

Do not misunderstand me. Woman suffrage is 
right. It is just. It is expedient. In all moral 
issues the woman voters make a loyal legion that 



A VICTORY AT LAST 309 

cannot be betrayed to the forces of evil ; and how- 
ever they are betrayed — as we all are — in campaigns 
against the Beast, the good that they do in an 
election is a great gain to a community and a 
powerful aid to reform. I believe that w T hen the 
women see the Beast, they will be the first to attack it. 
I believe that in this our first successful campaign 
against it, the women saved us. I have only Iried, 
in the preceding paragraphs, to answer a question 
that is in the mouths of many Eastern opponents 
of woman suffrage: "Why don't the women cure 
the political corruption in Colorado ?" 

Well, we had gone to the business men, to the 
ministers, to the teachers, and to the women's 
suffrage leaders, in search of money or an organi- 
zation with which to begin our fight; and we had 
gotten practically nothing but confidential good 
wishes. The corporation newspapers — the Den- 
ver Republican and the Denver Post — were, of 
course, against us. I went to Senator Patterson 
and asked him for the support of his papers, the 
Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Times; 
he replied that he would support me if I could 
get on a party ticket; but his managers seemed 
to object to wasting the influence of the papers in 
a hopeless, independent struggle. There was one 
other daily, the "little" Express, a Scripps 
paper that had been established in Denver 
by Mr. Scripps, at the solicitation of members of 
the Honest Election League, to aid in the fight 



310 THE BEAST 

for the people. It was sold for a cent a copy — 
the other papers sold for five cents — and it 
had gradually gained a circulation among the 
working people of the city. It had refused 
the free telephone service offered it by Mr. Field 
of the telephone company, and had kept itself 
clean of all corporation bribes and favours. 
Its editor was an incorruptibly fearless young 
man, Mr. B. F. Gurley, who had had experi- 
ence in Cleveland and Los Angeles. He knew 
the Beast and understood how to fight it. 
When I sent out my first appeal to the min- 
isters, asking them to come to a meeting in the 
Juvenile Court, Mr. Gurley gave notice of the 
meeting in the Express; and several labour leaders, 
whom I had never so much as met before, came 
to the Court and volunteered their aid. 

That — though I did not know it then — was 
the first stir of the popular uprising that was to 
come. I had never made any particular appeal 
to the labouring people, but they are, in every 
community, the most bruised and beaten slaves 
of the conditions that I was fighting; and they 
knew it! 

The next aid that came seems still to me an 
accident that was little short of miraculous. I 
was talking one day to some school teachers, in 
my chambers, about the impossibility of making 
a successful campaign without money to pay 
watchers at the polls, to employ workers to can- 



A VICTORY AT LAST 311 

vass the wards, to print election "literature" 
instructing the voters how to scratch, and to sup- 
port an organization that should arrange meetings 
and direct the whole campaign. I said I believed 
that if we had $5,000 for these purposes, we could 
win. I believed that the people were with me, 
but my experience in the governorship contest 
had shown me that where we had a little money 
and an efficient organization we could carry a 
county, and where we had not, we failed. And 
I said that I was going into the election without 
money, without an organization, merely to make 
a "campaign of education" again. 

There happened to be listening to me a lady 
whom I had met only a short time before. She 
had first heard of the Juvenile Court through Mr. 
Lincoln Steffens's articles in McClure's Maga- 
zine and she had later heard me lecture in the 
East. She had become interested in the work of 
the court; and now, after learning of our need of 
money to defend the court in an election, she 
went to one of the court officers and asked whether 
she might be allowed to contribute $5,000 to a 
campaign fund. She was not a wealthy woman, 
but she and her husband — she said — had set 
aside $5,000 to be devoted to philanthropic work 
and she felt that to use the money in defence of 
our court would be philanthropic. I took care 
first that she should learn how little hope there 
was that I could be reelected; I gave her as 



312 THE BEAST 

much discouraging political information as I 
could; and then, finding her still eager to help 
us, I gladly accepted her help. She has never 
allowed her name to be made known. She has 
never accepted any credit for her act. But there 
is not a shadow of doubt in my mind that she 
saved the Juvenile Court. 

We began to organize at once. Mr. E. V. 
Brake, a labour leader, took charge. He got 
volunteers among his followers to act as ward 
workers and even coaxed many away from the 
other parties to join with us. About two hundred 
women, many of them volunteers, came to our 
headquarters, took instructions on how to teach 
the voters to "scratch," and began to go from 
house to house repeating the lesson. They 
reported a strong sentiment in our favour. The 
politicians of both parties recognized it too, and 
I began to receive the usual overtures from "lead- 
ers" who were willing to drop a dummy candi- 
date in order to get my name on the party ticket. 
It was a presidential campaign, and the Repub- 
licans needed all the support they could get against 
Bryan. Mr. Vivian, the Republican State Chair- 
man, held conferences with his committeemen and 
ward leaders, and advocated my nomination. He 
was opposed by the corporation attorneys and 
particularly by Mr. Field, president of the telephone 
company, who appeared in person to threaten that 
if I were put on the Republican ticket he would 



A VICTORY AT LAST 313 

not give the~committee the $8,000 promised by 
the company to the Republican campaign fund. 
H. L.Doherty, president of the gas company, had 
sent word that if I were nominated on either party 
ticket, every responsible official head in the gas 
company's office should fall! Mr. Vivian and 
other Republicans told me that many members of 
the Central Committee were eager, now, to have 
me on the ticket, but the corporation magnates, 
with their hands in their pockets, blocked the way. 
The same sort of thing went on among the 
Democrats, and reports of it kept coming to me 
day by day. Mr. Field was the active head of 
the corporation opposition and he did not dis- 
guise it. When Mr. Gilson Gardener, the Wash- 
ington correspondent of the Scripps papers, 
came to Denver, Field said to him — in one 
of the most important pronouncements ever 
made by the Beast: "Our company is in 
politics? Yes. Why? By virtue of necessity. 
Our company contributes to political parties and 
for political purposes? Yes. Why? Because 
this is the modern system. It began years ago. It 
exists for the same reason that we contribute to a 
state fair or a Y. M. C. A. It became the custom, 
long since, to expect corporations to contribute 
to all kinds of things. And finally, it was politics. 
Then it became necessary. There came the 
unfair acts, and we needed men in office who 
would be our friends. 



314 THE BEAST 

"Our company is in politics in order to have 
friends. We never have asked for anything 
improper. I speak for no other corporation or 
person; but our company has always been above 
reproach. But we do have friends. We have 
them in both parties. They come to me and ask 
advice. They come and ask me to help them 
lay their plans. They come regardless of their 
parties and they hold meetings in my office. I 
am not a boss. I have carefully avoided being 
anything like that. But I can't help it if they 
come to me and ask advice." 

He admitted that he had opposed my nomina- 
tion in both parties. " My opposition/' he boasted, 
"was effective. Yes, it was effective with both 
parties. Judge Lindsey's name was left off both 
tickets. " He said he had opposed me because 
I had made attacks on his "personal character/' 
but that statement deceived no one. I had never 
attacked him except as one of the corporation 
presidents who were debauching politics and 
maintaining the political system that united the 
law-breaking "dives," gambling hells and broth- 
els with the law-breaking public-utility com- 
panies and their corrupted courts. He deceived 
no one — least of all his interviewer, Gilson 
Gardener, who wrote, in the Express: "Judge 
Lindsey has been left off two strong party tickets 
in defiance of the voters' will and in pure revenge, 
for the truth which he has told. It is the 



A VICTORY AT LAST 315 

work of the corporation powers — the tramway- 
telephone-water-gas combination, manipulated by- 
such men as Field and Evans." 

He certainly did not deceive the labour men. 
I was admitted to the meetings of their unions 
and addressed them night after night. In com- 
pany with Rev. A. H. Fish, of the Central Pres- 
byterian Church, and Mr. L. M. French, a labour 
leader, I went to the factories and shops at lunch- 
eon hour, talking to the men and women workers. 
We made it plain that our fight was against the 
tyranny of the corporations. The unions passed 
resolutions endorsing our work, and the members of 
the barbers' union made every barber shop in Den- 
ver a centre of propaganda which their lathered 
customers could not escape. We sent out, from our 
headquarters, cards to the voters for them to sign, 
pledging their votes; and we received 23,000 of 
these pledges signed. 

The women — not so much their suffrage leaders 
or their politicians, as the mothers in the homes and 
the working women in the factories and the shops 
— came out for us by the thousands. Our head- 
quarters swarmed with newsboys and school- 
children anxious to help; and some of those boys 
made the most effective campaign orators we had. 
It was tickling to the verge of tears to hear them, 
on a public platform, addressing a crowded hall 
with their pathetic earnestness and their childish 
arguments. If the "kids" were going to "stay 



316 THE BEAST 

wit'" me, they pleaded, why shouldn't "the 
folks"? One of these boys spoke to an audience 
of several thousand at a W. C. T. U. convention 
in the Auditorium, and raised a heart-shaking 
enthusiasm; and the aid and inspiration given us 
by these noble women was a power in the 
campaign. The corporation newspapers cut all 
mention of it from their reports of the meetings — 
maintaining a policy of concerted silence about 
my candidacy in an attempt to "bottle" us. 
But the Denver Express kept on hammering; 
the signed pledges kept coming in; and at last 
Senator Patterson's two papers swung into line 
and things began to move with a whoop. The 
Christian Citizenship Union had succeeded in 
reaching the "church element" in spite of the 
opposition of those wealthy churches whose 
boards were controlled bv the Beast. The 
labouring men and their wives packed our meet- 
ings. In the foreign quarters, and particularly 
on the West Side among the Russian Jews, the 
poor mothers whose children I had befriended 
received us with tears running down their cheeks, 
so that I could hardly speak to them for the choke 
in my throat. The people were up — with a 
shout — with a shout that was at once angry and 
tearful with anger, for we did not yet believe we 
could win — and the politicians shut their ears 
to it, and orated about their presidential candi- 
dates, and placarded the town with "Rebuke 



A VICTORY AT LAST 317 

Guggenheim — write Bryan on your ballot/' so 
as to insure the election of Chas. J. Hughes, Jr., 
attorney for the tramway company, as another 
corporation senator to join Guggenheim in 
Washington! And the machine that called for a 
" rebuke" of Guggenheim w^as the machine that 
had elected Guggenheim ! And the Hughes who 
was now to be elected, on that "rebuke," was the 
Hughes who, for years, in the courts, had fought 
for the corporations against the people who were 
to administer the "rebuke " ! These are the tricks 
of the Beast! 

As upon former occasions, w r hen the Beast 
in Denver was in trouble, Mr. Bryan was sum- 
moned to act as the eloquent — but, I am sure, 
unconscious — "tout" and "capper" of the 
System's confidence game. In 1902, with the 
grafting County Commissioners on his platform, 
he appealed to the people to vote the Democratic 
ticket, and the grafters applauded him with all 
the enthusiasm of guilt. Now, in 1908, with 
Chas. J. Hughes, Jr., as the candidate of the local 
utility corporations, on a reform platform that 
has since proved to be the usual corporation 
"fake," Mr. Bryan called to the people to sup- 
port Mr. Hughes, and used every eloquence of 
his oratory, unwittingly, to "stall" the voters into 
the corporation "deal." Great is the Beast; 
and Bryan — even Bryan sometimes — is its 
prophet ! 



318 THE BEAST 

Our campaign went on gaily, nevertheless. It 
was a straight campaign against corporation 
rule. I made no appeals to sentiment ; I often left 
the question of our court work out of my speeches. 
I was determined that if I was to be beaten, I 
must be beaten as the opponent of the Beast; 
and that if I was to be saved, it must be by voters 
who saw who were their masters and revolted 
against them. All the usual tricks of the Beast 
were used against us. Many Democratic and 
Republican "workers," in going their rounds, 
whenever they were asked by a voter how to vote 
for me, replied: "Oh, that's all right. He's 
on our ticket. Just vote it straight." And our 
workers were kept busy explaining that I was on 
neither party ticket. In order to issue instructions 
to voters, we asked the clerks in the office of the 
County Clerk and Recorder where my name would 
appear on the official ballot; they replied: "In 
the fourth column about half way down ." Accord- 
ingly, in our printed directions, we told the Voters 
to look for my name "in the fourth column, half 
way down." But when the official ballot was 
issued, there appeared, half way down the fourth 
column: "For County Judge for short term, 
to succeed Ben. B. Lindsey," with the "Ben. B. 
Lindsey" in very large letters where it should not 
have appeared at all. Some distance below, in 
smaller type, my name appeared as an independ- 
ent candidate for Juvenile Judge; and as a result 



A VICTORY AT LAST 319 

of this trick, it was estimated, some eight thousand 
votes intended for me were lost. In an ordinary 
election, it w T ould have been sufficient to defeat me. 
But this was not an ordinary election, as the 
vote showed. When the polls opened, the betting 
was four to one that I would not get ten thou- 
sand votes. Early in the forenoon, it was known 
that at every polling place in Denver the people 
were "scratching" as they had never "scratched" 
before. Women wearing long white badges — 
"Vote for Judge Lindsey" — watched the 
approaches to the polling places all day long, 
without relief, and accosted every voter. A news- 
boy, on the previous night, had obtained a dollar 
from our committee for "campaign expenses," 
had bought a dollar's worth of coloured chalk and 
sent out a horde of boys to mark the sidewalks, 
the walls and the fences with "Vote for Judge 
Lindsey" — and the party henchmen with brushes 
and mops had not succeeded in entirely obliterat- 
ing that "handwriting on the w^all." By midday 
the betting gave odds in my favour, and the 
excitement among the politicians was breathless. 
The foreigners who could not speak English 
came to the polls with cards on which friends had 
written for them, "I want to vote for Judge Lind- 
sey." The women, everywhere, made no secret 
of the fact that they intended to vote for me. We 
began to believe that the impossible was about to 
happen at last. 



320 THE BEAST 

I was, myself, the last to believe. I had faith 
in the ultimate triumph of the cause for which 
we were fighting, but I did not believe that we 
could win in this campaign. I was resigned to 
the loss of the Juvenile Court to the agents of 
the Beast, and I had made arrangements to 
carry the fight on in a lecturing tour. I did not 
credit the first favourable reports from my friends 
when the polls closed. It was a presidential 
campaign; I was an almost wholly unsupported 
candidate for a small county office* ; and never, 
of recent years at least, in a city like Denver, had 
any independent candidate in America carried a 
vote under such circumstances. When one of 
our committee telephoned me, at my house, that 
I had been elected by 10,000 majority, I refused 
to accept the report as even plausible. But the 
details kept coming in, from the well-to-do pre- 
cincts on Capitol Hill, from the foreign quarters, 
from the home districts of the working men and 
women, and even from the wards where the 
" dives " were thickest; and all but three gave 
me pluralities. At last, late in the evening, I 
was summoned to the telephone by a call from 
my old opponent "Big Steve" — A. M.Steven- 
son — at Republican Headquarters ; and he said 

"Ben, it's a d miracle. You're elected, and 

that's about all that's certain. There's been so 



*I had, however, been nominated on the Prohibition ticket. 



A VICTORY AT LAST 321 

much 'scratching' we don't know w r here the h 

w r e're at!" 

Elected? Out of 65,000 votes cast, we had 
polled, on the official count, 32,000, which was 
almost as many as my tw r o opponents had together. 
Even without the 8,000 votes of which w T e had 
been cheated by the trick in the ballot — and 
although these votes had been counted for my 
opponents — I had a plurality of almost 15,000. 
The people had at last "seen the cat" and they had 
"scratched" it to the bone! I went to bed that 
night, no longer a slave among slaves, but a 
freedman in a community that had at last risen 
against its masters and given them a w r arning of 
the wrath to come! 

What matter that the legislative candidates 
elected on that day on a reform platform, refused, 
in the session that followed, to pass any of the 
election laws which they were solemnly pledged 
to give us? What matter that the corporations 
obtained the election of Chas. J. Hughes as 
United States Senator? The people see "the 
cat"! They know what influence prevented the 
passage of the election laws. They know w T ho 
elected Hughes and they know whom he repre- 
sents. They are on the trail of the Beast, 
and some day — soon — in Colorado, they will 
be cutting its hide into cat-o'-nine-tail strips for 
the backs of the legislative traitors and hired 
betrayers of public trust who have sold the com- 



322 THE BEAST 

munity into slavery and been rewarded with an 
eminence of shame. This state, founded in 
liberty, cannot be governed by the criminal intel- 
ligence of corrupt men. Our people, born to 
freedom, will not see injustice bought and sold in 
their courts, laws purchased in their legislatures, 
cities robbed of their streets, vice protected in its 
dens, homes despoiled, girls debauched, children 
ruined, the poor starved at their work, and the 
hired procurers of political prostitution enriched 
with the profits of all this tyranny, this misery, 
this disgrace. The day is coming. The reck- 
oning is due. 



CHAPTER XVIII 

CONCLUSION 

I HAVE been asked a hundred times: "Has 
the fight been worth while? Wouldn't it 
have been better to let the corporations alone 
and just devote yourself to the children? You 
have made enemies who have hampered you in 
your work. You can't get the contributions you 
used to get. The court has suffered because of 
the attacks upon it. And the corporations are 
just as powerful as they ever were." Let me 
answer that. Let me give a little summary of 
what we have gained, for the people, in this 
struggle. And let me first try to express a part 
of it in terms of dollars and cents. 

According to Julius Aichele, a corporation poli- 
tician who was at the time County Clerk in 
Denver, our fight against the grafting County 
Commissioners resulted in a saving to the county, 
in four years, of $300,000. After our exposure 
of these printing steals, a committee of the Legis- 
lature investigated the state printing and reported 
that $90,000 a year could be saved; an inspector 
of state printing was appointed, and he has since 
claimed, I understand, that he saved the state 

323 



324 THE BEAST 

$50,000 a year — or $200,000 in the four years. 
The Clerk of the Supreme Court made a similar 
investigation of the court's printing, and effected 
a considerable saving; I do not know how much. 
But, you see, this one small fight against graft 
saved the people at least a half a million dollars. 

As a result of my anti-machine decision in the 
licence -inspector case, $70,000 a year was col- 
lected from dive keepers and saloon men, which 
had been left uncollected before because the 
Police Board inspectors were " protecting' ' these 
men. This is on the testimony of Mr. Wm. 
Burghart, the inspector who succeeded the Sys- 
tem's tools. 

By obtaining a law forbidding the collection of 
fees for prosecuting children, we have saved the 
state $10,000 a year since 1903 — about $50,000 
to date. Before this law was passed two little 
girls who had stolen a few pennies' worth of bright 
beads from a shop, were charged with burglary, 
and the fees for convicting them — paid to the 
constable, justice, sheriff, jurors, district attorney 
and court — amounted to at least $150. 

By sending boys unaccompanied to state institu- 
tions we have saved in sheriff's fees at least $5,000. 
Our books show that the sheriff's fees for taking 
two boys to the State Reformatory at Buena Vista 
were $140. The County Commissioners held 
that I might not send prisoners to Buena Vista 
without a sheriff — that they were criminals and 



CONCLUSION 325 

had to be treated as such — but our right to send 
them unaccompanied, on trust and honour, to 
other institutions, could not be denied. 

By our reform of the probate laws we have 
saved estates in probate at least $50,000 a year 
— $300,000 to date. 

By taking all children's cases into the County 
Court in 1901 and abolishing most of the fees for 
trying them, we saved the county about $10,000. 
By doing the work of the Juvenile Court — when 
it was first instituted — without salary, we saved 
the county the cost of an extra court, about 
$12,000 for a year. By calling in an outside judge 
and handling the Juvenile Court work in the 
County Court, we saved the public $10,000 a 
year for six years — $60,000. 

In 1903 Governor Peabody sent an inspector 
to our court to compare the cost of our method 
of handling children's cases with the cost under 
the old system ; and in his message to the Legisla- 
ture he stated that in eighteen months our methods 
had "resulted in a saving to the county and the 
state of $88,827.68." This, in nine years, would 
amount to $500,000. 

In 1901 there was a movement in Denver to 
establish a Parental School for chronic truants. 
The Legislature even passed a law providing for 
its establishment. It would have cost $50,000 
to build and $25,000 a year to maintain it. Our 
probation and report system obviated the necessity 



326 THE BEAST 

of such a Parental School, at a saving, to date, 
of $250,000. Our Detention School, which takes 
the place of the jail for children, costs less than 
$10,000 a year for equipment and maintenance. 

By refusing to allow the County Commissioners 
to appoint political " workers'' to sinecures in the 
County Court, we saved in three years about 
$18,000. 

During the seven years that I was judge of the 
County Court we not only paid all the salaries 
of the judge and the clerks of the court out of the 
fees paid by litigants, but we turned over to the 
county more than $50,000 earned by the court. So 
that while I was judge of the County Court, the 
county not only did not pay us a penny for our work, 
but we paid the county $50,000 for letting us do the 
work. And if you will add up the preceding items 
of saving, you will find that we paid the county 
$50,000 for letting us save it more than two 
millions ! 

But the real glory of our struggle has not been 
its saving of dollars and cents, but of flesh and 
blood. When I first visited the Industrial School 
at Golden, I found armed guards in the reforma- 
tory buildings and some of the boys shackled 
with ball and chain on the grounds; I found the 
iron boot in use, the boys being flogged in the 
presence of their fellows, and many of the usual 
prison brutalities practised on the miserable and 
rebellious children. To-day there are no armed 



CONCLUSION 327 

guards, no chains, no prison restraints. The 
superintendent in charge — instead of being a 
ward politician — is an educated, trained and 
capable man, Mr. F. L. Paddleford, whose work 
is an honour to him and a blessing to the com- 
munity. Most of the boys come alone to the 
school, stay there of their own will, receive visits 
from their parents, accompany them to the rail- 
road station unwatched, and return themselves 
to their duties; they learn useful trades and 
receive the semi-military training of a good board- 
ing school, with drill and a military band of their 
own and officers promoted for good behaviour. 
The whole school, on a recent gala day in Denver, 
marched in parade and enjoyed the freedom of 
the city; and every last boy of the four hundred, 
at the day's end, was back in his dormitory. They 
are happy ; they are learning to be honest, healthy, 
useful citizens, instead of brutalized and rebellious 
criminals. Of a Sunday, in their chapel, it would 
lift up your heart with exultation to hear them 
sing. If we had done nothing else in our long 
struggle — if we had nothing to show for it but 
this reformed "prison" — that Sunday chorus 
of childish happiness and good will would be of 
itself a song of adequate reward, a chant of suf- 
ficient victory. 

When I went on the County Bench the dive 
keepers, gamblers and saloon men who debauched 
boys and girls were not only protected by the 



328 THE BEAST 

police and other officials, but by the technicalities 
of the law. It was impossible to convict the 
saloon man or the gambler unless we could 
prove the serving of "liquor" to young people 
or their participation in the gambling game; 
and this was always difficult. Now we have 
"contributory delinquency " laws that require 
the keeper of a saloon or any disreputable resort 
to forbid boys and girls frequenting it; and he 
can be punished if they are so much as seen there. 
We have obtained laws that will permit our 
probation officers to arrest him; and we can 
ourselves file a complaint against him if the 
District Attorney refuses to act. The result is 
that no man or woman in Denver — no, not the 
head of the System and king of the corporations 
himself — has political "pull" enough to save 
him from the punishments of the law if he offends 
against the poorest slum child in Denver. No 
one can know how much that means to the com- 
munity unless he can remember the horrible 
traffic in young virtue that used to make our 
streets and alleys in the dive district the open 
roads to physical and moral hell; and no one who 
knows it can doubt that our fight has been a 
thousand, thousand times worth while — yes, even 
if this alone had been the one result of it! 

We have obtained an effective registration law 
that prevents most of the ballot-box stuffing. We 
have obtained a probate code that is conceded by 



CONCLUSION 329 

lawyers to be one of the best in America. We 
have obtained amendments to the child-labour 
laws, affording children better protection and 
adding a jail penalty for violation instead of a 
light fine; amendments to the compulsory school 
law, requiring a complete school year for all 
children, and providing for the relief of needy 
children; laws forbidding the prosecution of 
children for crime and requiring that they be 
treated, under the chancery jurisdiction, and the 
rules of equity, as wards of the state, needing " aid, 
help, assistance and encouragement" ; a provision in 
the city charter and the statutes of the state, forbid- 
ding the placing of children under fourteen years of 
age in jail, and establishing a detention home-school 
where they may be cared for; a set of laws, 
enforceable in both chancery and criminal courts, 
making parents responsible for neglecting their 
children or setting them a bad example; a law 
for the special care of dependent children, pro- 
viding for the inspection of all homes and institu- 
tions, public or private, for the care of dependent 
children; a law requiring parents, who are able 
to pay, to support their children in state institu- 
tions; a law guaranteeing orphan children at 
least $2,000 from the estate of the parents before 
creditors are paid; a law giving the judge the 
right to place orphan children with persons 
professing the same religion as the parents; a 
law forbidding any court to take a child away 



330 THE BEAST 

from a parent until the parent's rights have 
been carefully guarded and adjudicated upon; 
probation laws for adults; and a dozen other 
minor laws and amendments of similar purport 
and effect. 

We have helped to obtain night schools in Den- 
ver, ungraded schools for backward children, 
public playgrounds, and public baths. We have 
failed to obtain trade schools, but we have not 
ceased our efforts to obtain them. We have 
established summer camps for poor children in the 
mountains, obtained work for them in the beet 
fields and fruit orchards, and found employment 
and assistance for thousands of city children. 
Our Juvenile Improvement Association for the 
betterment and protection of the child has spread 
over the whole country. Our work for the children 
has been taken up by President Roosevelt in a mes- 
sage to Congress, by John Hay, Secretary of State, 
by Herbert Gladstone in a recommendation to 
the British House of Commons, by Professor 
Freudenthal, as a representative of the German 
Emperor, and by officials from countries in all 
parts of the world. Of all the thousands of 
children whom we have dealt with, not more than 10 
per cent, have been returned for a second offence; 
and we estimate that 95 per cent, have "made 
good" in the end. No one can know what a saving 
of young citizens this means. One of the tramway 
company's detectives is authority for the statement 



CONCLUSION 331 

that of 1,000 boys whom he has brought to our 
court, for acts of lawlessness committed against 
the railroad, only one class of boys has ever been 
returned for a second offence — and these were 
not more than a dozen newsboys who "hopped" on 
the cars to sell their papers. Under the old methods 
of criminal prosecution and jail sentence, from 65 to 
75 per cent, of the children were returned to the jail 
for a second term within five years ; and every term 
in jail meant a term in a public school of crime 
that made the children worse instead of better. 
Very few of these laws — and none of the 
important ones — could have been obtained with- 
out breaking with the political system by which 
the corporations profit and w r hich their bribes and 
influence maintain. Few of these laws could have 
been obtained without first rousing the community 
to a sense of its responsibilities to the child and 
stirring up the people by a campaign that was 
sure to be offensive to the political powers. We 
should have been false to the child had we failed 
to point out that the rule of social, economic, 
industrial and political injustice maintained by 
the corporations was responsible for much of 
the child's misfortune and most of the increase in 
crime ; and we should have shirked our duty had we 
failed to help in educating the public to see that the 
greatest wrongs to the home, the child and the com- 
munity are inflicted by the rich criminals of the 
community. And as for the contributions that we 



332 THE BEAST 

might have obtained from the corporations by 
kneeling to them, let me boast that by asserting my 
independence and going on the public platform to 
obtain our reforms, I have been able in nine years 
to earn enough as a lecturer to be able to donate 
$20,000 to our work out of my earnings and my 
salary; and this is a good deal more than we 
could have begged from our corporation masters 
even if we had kissed the ground in front of 
their feet. 

Observe, too, that these results have been 
gained by the "picayune" fight of a judge of a 
small county court, without money, without 
"influence" and for the most part without an 
organization. Imagine what could have been 
done by a leader of the people with a political 
following and a place in the Legislature from 
which to speak! What defeats might not have 
been turned into victories! What losses to the 
people might not have been made unimaginable 
gains ! 

Consider these facts: In our first city charter 
we had provisions giving the city power, from 
time to time, to "make reasonable regulations 
concerning the operation and use of all franchise 
rights and privileges operated and used in the 
city and county, and to fix reasonable maximum 
charges for water, light, telephone service, street 
railway fares and other utilities or properties 
devoted to the public use." This charter was 



CONCLUSION 333 

defeated and these rights denied the citizens by 
the corporations with the help of Boss Speer and 
his Democratic city machine and Police Com- 
missioner Frank Adams and his protected "dive 
element." 

By the use of the Legislature, the courts and 
public officials, the corporations are establishing a 
power trust that has obtained incredible rights in 
all the watersheds and power streams surrounding 
Denver, without any reservation to the state of the 
people's rights in these natural resources ; so that our 
children and our children's children, for all time, 
will be compelled to pay the heirs of the Beast 
for the right to use the water powder that should 
have been an asset of the community instead 
of an asset of the Beast. 

Some of the coal companies have obtained from 
the State Land Board hundreds of acres of land 
devoted by the state to the support of the schools. 
Some of this land is so rich in coal that it is worth 
at least $2,000 an acre; and the coal companies 
have obtained it for nominal prices. These 
frauds have been notorious for years — and not 
less notorious has been the recent failure of the 
courts to punish the guilty state official who was 
the tool of the land robbers. 

All laws, such as the eight-hour laws, the 
employer's liability law, and laws requiring the 
use of safety appliances have been either 
defeated or made ineffective by the corporation 



334 THE BEAST 

control of the Legislatures that should have 
passed the laws or of the public officials who 
should enforce them. The State Railroad Com- 
mission has been a pitiful joke. The system of 
railroad rebates and unjust discriminations in 
railroad charges has flourished poisonously. The 
railroad lobby, with one of Senator Teller's brothers 
as attorney for the Union Pacific Railroad, has 
strangled every bill that attempted to regulate the 
railroads for the public good; so that, for example, 
the son of ex-United States Senator Dorsey (the 
other member of the Teller law firm) was able 
to boast to the General Solicitor of the Union 
Pacific Railroad, in a letter written from Denver 
in May, 1903: "At the last session of the Legisla- 
ture, although many bills were introduced which 
would greatly prejudice the railroad company's 
interests, no legislation was enacted to our dis- 
advantage. On the contrary several acts were 
passed which were favourable to railroad com- 
panies, some of which had been caused to be 
introduced by the Union Pacific Railroad 
Company." 

One of the bills referred to as prejudicial to the 
railroad company's interests — according to a 
previous letter written by Teller and Dorsey in 
February, 1903 — was "House bill No. 181, by 
Mr. Frewen," which provided "penalties for 
failure to comply with existing statutes in 
respect to safety appliances, etc." Teller and 



CONCLUSION 335 

Dorsey reported that "every effort should be made 
to defeat" this bill, and enquired, "Will you kindly 
advise us whether Union Pacific Railroad Com- 
pany is willing to pay its share of any reasonable 
expense incurred in this connection ?" President 
Burt replied that the bill was one of those "more 
or less objectionable" and "should be defeated. " 
"Whatever expense," he wrote, "needs to be 
incurred in connection with legislative matters, 
you are authorized to make." The bill was 
killed in committee. And let me add, as a com- 
mentary on the defeat of such laws requiring the 
safeguarding of workmen engaged in dangerous 
occupations, that in the nation's last generation 
of childhood, 32,000 children were made orphans 
by coal-mine explosions alone, and three-fourths of 
these explosions might have been prevented by 
the use of safety appliances such as the govern- 
ments require in Germany, Belgium and other 
European countries.* 

In the last session of the Legislature (April, 
1909) all attempts to pass the "platform pledges" 
on which the Democrats had gained office were 
defeated by the united corporation legislators 
among the Democrats and Republicans alike. 
We could obtain no anti-straight ticket law, no 
direct nomination law, no corrupt-practices act 
— no measure designed to restore representative 

*These figures are on the authority of published government reports, 
conservatively estimated. 



336 THE BEAST 

government and overthrow the rule of the Beast 
by freeing our elections from the control of the 
corporations. The same Legislature killed the 
bill giving the people a court in which to contest 
a fraudulent franchise-election, although the attor- 
neys for the corporations had contended in my 
court that, until such a bill was passed, there was 
no court on earth in which the people could recover 
the hundred million dollars' worth of public 
property that had been stolen from them by the 
franchise-election frauds. When the bill was 
killed, the Legislature was controlled by the cor- 
poration machine that elected Chas. J. Hughes to 
the United States Senate: and Chas. J. Hughes 
was one of the attorneys who defended the cor- 
porations in the franchise-election contests. When 
the bill was killed its fate depended most upon a 
"Special Orders" committee of three men, of 
whom two were Senator "Billy" Adams, the 
most notorious corporation champion in the 
Senate, and Senator Rodney J. Bardwell, the 
paid attorney of the Gas and Electric Com- 
pany. And this same Bardwell introduced, and 
the Legislature gaily passed, two bills giving the 
Gas and Electric Company "special privileges" 
in prosecuting persons who stole gas or electricity, 
by practically providing that the accused person 
in such cases should be required to prove himself 
innocent or go to jail for as much as ninety days 
for stealing gas! Xo bill to protect the people 



CONCLUSION 337 

from the steal of a gas franchise worth a fortune 
— and a special bill to protect the gas company 
from a steal of gas worth ten cents! A bill to 
require a citizen to prove himself innocent of 
having tampered with a damaged gas metre — 
and no bill to allow the citizens the right to prove 
the gas company guilty of having tampered with 
a franchise election! 

The same Legislature defeated a Public Utilities 
Bill that would have prevented the Gas Company 
from watering its stocks and bonds twenty-five 
millions. Twenty -five millions on which the 
citizens of Denver must pay interest! Money 
stolen from our homes by a method more refined 
but none the less criminal than the entry of a 
"second-story man." 

There is no end to it. I might go on in this way 
to fill a volume with instances of proof that the 
State of Colorado is exploited and the people 
robbed by a government by the Beast and for 
the Beast. A system of corruption that aims 
to pick the corruptible man for public service, 
and refuses the honest one an opportunity to serve, 
has made most of the public life and administra- 
tion of public affairs in Colorado a gigantic failure, 
a huge oppression. The functions of government 
are no longer discharged as against the corpora- 
tions, except where an error of judgment on 
the part of the corporations, or an unforeseen 
frustration of their plans, has permitted an honest 



338 THE BEAST 

man to obtain an opportunity of honestly filling 
a public office. 

The ignorant and the dishonest apologists of 
the System contend that the men of wealth have, 
in self-defence, merely corrupted corruption and 
bought up the politicians who were preying upon 
them. You might believe it, if there had ever 
been a case in our courts in which a corporation 
had prosecuted a legislator for blackmail or 
attempted to defend itself from a dishonest public 
official. You might believe it, if you could 
believe that the boys who steal "junk" are prey- 
ing upon the junk dealer who induces them to 
steal it. And even if you believed it, you would 
have to concede that there is no patriotism in 
business, no responsibility to the state, no 
obligation of citizenship to expose dishonesty 
in public office or oppose the profit of it, and 
no higher sense in the man of wealth than a 
criminal self-interest and the cowardice of a 
knave. 

Such an excuse — such an apology — it is 
impossible to accept. Every man who has had 
anything to do with politics knows that it is a lie. 
Our Legislatures have been bought by the cor- 
porations not for self-protection ; our courts have 
been corrupted in no struggle against injustice; 
the "dives" have been subsidized against society 
not because society oppressed the good. The 
whole System is an alliance of law breakers against 



CONCLUSION 339 

the sources, agents and penalties of the law. It 
is the alliance of a " plunderbund " — a compact 
among thieves and criminals, rich and poor, for 
the subversion of law and the protection of illegal 
profit. 

Even though I had never succeeded in doing 
anything to check this System, to oppose this 
corruption, I should still be content that I had 
fought it. For such a defence of liberty, it is a 
privilege to fight. It is an honour to be defeated 
in it. It is a happiness beyond glory to succeed, 
however obscurely, in the smallest struggle for it. 
It is my one hope that as long as I live I may be 
able, I may be found worthy, I may be considered 
fit, to devote myself to this allegiance, and in this 
cause to defend my state and its people, my own 
birthright and our children's inheritance, our 
right to freedom and our institutions of freedom 
that are founded in that right. 

Well, I have done. I have tried to write with- 
out malice — to do no one an injustice — to tell 
the truth, without fear as without favour, in the 
firm belief that the truth shall make us free. I 
shall be called "an enemy of the state," because 
I have attacked the enemies of the state — for 
the corporations in Colorado, like King Louis in 
France, hold majestically, "The state? It is I!" 
I shall be called a traitor to the community because 
I have tried to expose the traitors in the com- 



340 THE BEAST 

munity; and the traitorous newspapers of the 
community will be the first to raise the cry. I 
shall be called "a blackener of the fair name of 
Colorado' ' because I have named the men who 
have corrupted, debauched and prostituted Colo- 
rado — for no men hate the light more than the 
men who profit by the crimes which the light 
discloses. Heaven help them! — Heaven help 
us all. We are struggling toward better things, 
a happier country, a more perfect civilization. 
We may never arrive, but, whatever the end, the 
aim is worth the agony. Let us struggle. Let 
us hope. 

THE END 



fU^J Qj^ :,* i in 



MRS. BEN B. tINDSBT 

APRIL 15, 1949 

THE LIBRARY OF CONGES 



